Kinship Beset
by Tomorrow
Summary: This is a rather... interesting retelling of the fairytale "Brother and Sister." It does involve some sexual description and attempted rape. 1xR, slight 6x9.
1. Innocence

AN: This is a rather... interesting retelling of the fairytale "Brother and Sister." Just to warn you, it does involve sexual description and attempted rape... amongst other things.   
  
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or "Brother and Sister," as recorded by the Brothers Grimm, or Loreena McKennitt's "Samain Night."   
  
My mother died when I was only four years old, but the repercussions of her death continued to haunt me from that morning until the few years just recently past. A wretched, fateful dawn in spite— I suffered to neglect it, but still the memory returns. Its rustic chill remains within me, specter of my despicable past.   
  
The sun could scarcely reach the spires of the gallows that morning, for the clouds were so thick and sated with the apparitions of many an abandoned child that stalked the woods. They whispered sometimes as they wandered passed; a mournful gaze or frightened shudder was their only memory of a mortal life stolen, breath in unison with the wind as they sounded their cry in the hush of dawn. It was a stale shriek… nearly deft. But today they wept, their tears falling from phantom lashes and purifying this lowly, earthly crypt, rueful for her weary soul in the form of a gentle morning rain. Amongst this numinous and foggy realm remained only a few slits for daybreak to peek through as my father and I stood before my mother's body-- Sprawled out before the dampened soil of her grave. A reminder of her irrevocable stillness, a symbol within the vibrato and wail from the rain, the dawn cast a soft but dreary light upon the earth. It washed the woman's skin in a subtle glow, so disparate from her pale cheeks. Her lips were white and cold since no breath parted them. And my father clutched my hand beside me to console me the only way he knew: with detachment.   
  
He held a baby in his arms then, still smeared in the bearer's blood, and he tried to shield it from the rain. A little girl, my sister... the child which my mother had died giving birth to. A forfeiture of life under the premise of maternal obligation. The baby came a month earlier than expected, and Mother lost a lot of blood during the delivery. Too much blood.   
  
She died just after she handed the baby girl to my father, whispering with ragged breaths as her blood continued to soak the down and sheets of the bed in enough crimson to condemn her to her fate, "You. Shall call her. Relena. 'Child. Of. Lament...'" and bowed her head in weakness and in pain. Her last word was a groan of such sorrow that her form trembled with its release, resonating into the twilight and hushing the crying babe with her mother's final lullaby.   
  
And that was the end. She was gone.   
  
But being one so young and, I suppose, as Father thought, unable to understand the finality of death, he always told me that my mother was only sleeping when I asked about her. We had to leave her alone so that she could rest— She merely needed to rest. That's why we buried her in the ground, he would always say as I sat at the window, eyes fastened to the grave where she lay. We did it so that no one could disturb her slumber, and, supposedly, the soil muffled the forest's din.   
  
And I believed him.   
  
I was so young and naive that I took him at his word. So foolish that whenever I was outside doing chores after that day, if I passed near her grave, I would always tiptoe and offer a silent prayer that the birds would be still and wolves deterred from unearthing the loose mound. And I can only scoff at myself now to think that I truly believed they could waken her, that the blood she left on the bed that night meant nothing. I was in denial. Gullible. Stupid.   
  
It wasn't until one night later that summer, when the ghostly children that walk the woods met under the full moon—its silver beams shimmering through their fingertips and dancing across their faceless cheeks as they locked hands in a circle around the mound—that I understood Mother... wasn't going to come back.   
  
In a perfect ring they stood, stepping around the coven with entwined hands that they raised up to the stars--witnesses of their eerie dirge. Little voices echoed a pitiful verse while they turned the circle the opposite way to haunt the night. Deafening love; hypnotizing the moonlight.   
  
_People cry and children die   
  
No one ever hearing   
  
How they scream or how they sigh   
  
Through the dark so dreary_   
  
Even as their hymn enshrouded the grave she didn't stir; the song that called all weary souls to life didn't reach hers. She wasn't there— She left me here alone... not even offering her voice with theirs. Yet their song continued through the night.   
  
Without me— Without her.   
  
Then a year went by. Despite the revelation of that night, I managed well enough. It was difficult sometimes when the tempests set in, their drownéd whips of lightning painting the skies in luminous ribbons that shimmered as they cracked against one another, joined with the roar of fellow thunder that scourged the gusts that wailed passed. Nearly surreal—   
  
My mother used to sit by my bedside on such nights... she'd sing to me tales she had heard of long ago, stories her mother told her when she was my age. The storm was nothing then—with her there.   
  
I'd never felt as safe as when Mother stroked my forehead as I lay still in her lap and she sang her lullabies over the storms' tantrums. It. Took every bit of hatred I had for my current situation— That she had gone. And. Left me with nothing but a memory. It took ignoring all that so as to not cry myself to sleep on those later nights when the thunder just got louder and louder with every bellow. It just served as a cruel voice to remind me, how much I missed her sweet voice and the feel of her warm fingers through my hair... where now there was only chill.   
  
"Milliardo," she always murmured just above the cry of the storm when she thought me to be asleep upon her lap, "do not forget the way my lips feel when pressed against your skin or the warmth of my hand on your face. But even... if you forget all that," she would whisper with a shaking voice as her hands began to quiver, "you must remember the sound of my song against the storm. Never forget..." No. I could never forget. I—   
  
But now I digress.   
  
As I said before, I managed with the knowledge of my mother's death, but Father was never able to handle that fact as well as I did. He just seemed so withdrawn after the morning she left us, attending my younger sister and I out of duty more than love, so I perceived. His hold upon his daughter was lax; his eyes were glazed over as she wailed to be fed. It was as if he couldn't even hear her, like his spirit had fled even if his body still remained on this earth as a mere, cryptic keeper. As far as he was concerned, I could handle myself, and I had to since he wouldn't. The man was just biding his time, anticipating the moon's rising as it meant escape from consciousness and dreading the sun's return to the horizon as it brought just the opposite: the following day. Being alone just never suited him. I think because he was afraid of what we all, as humans with an embedded desire for warmth and love, fear most: loneliness.   
  
And it would be an adequate guess to say that was what probably drove him to seek the companionship of another woman besides my mother, when at her burial he professed an undying devotion to her even beyond the constraints of time itself— That he would never find another to replace her. But grief can make even the most willful individuals break their vows in despair and with the threat of a lonesome grave, and it claimed my father as its next victim.   
  
He married another woman only a year and five days after Mother died, barely giving her corpse enough time for maggots to consume. Disdainful. She was a woman who frequented the market only a few miles out of the forest where he'd go weekly to sell the furniture he'd made. Their courtship was a brief one... so brief that I was unaware of it.   
  
They called her Lady Une.   
  
I never did understand why she married him. As her title implied, she was a Lady, a child of noble blood, with long dark hair and the most stunning brown eyes that offset her naturally pale skin. With such beauty, she could have had any man she desired with a dowry as plentiful as her comeliness to match.   
  
But even so, for whatever reason—which I know wasn't love—she chose my father.   
  
And I hated her. The moment I, as a boy of five years, looked upon her, chills slithered down my spine in waves of an unprecedented forbearance, of an intrinsic dread beyond my childish intelligence. My eyes traveled up her body as she stood indignantly for me to observe; I was especially distrustful, since I didn't even know her until the day my father introduced her to me as his bride. But the moment I looked into her hellish bronze leer I tore my gaze away, my hand trembling slightly from the intensity of her glare. It was hard. Vengeful even.   
  
But I didn't know why. I couldn't say why I felt so small when she looked at me-- _Stared_ at me.  
  
She may have been beautiful with an aristocratic title, but her manner; her stealthy grace; the licentious way she stood before me— They all reeked of deception, of some sort of cunning that I couldn't pinpoint being as young as I was. But when my attention was brought to her eyes, I was startled, petrified to find that they showed me nothing—black as pitch behind those muddy, elusive irises. Abysmal coves of damnable mire that held only more filth the deeper one tried to delve. She didn't know kindness, for otherwise her eyes would have shown me so. She didn't know warmth, or her sight would have been a welcome sensation on my skin. She couldn't know fidelity, because then her eyes would have softened when they beheld my father. No. She knew only vanity and avarice and advantage.   
  
I think she hated me, too. She must have, because when she stared me up and down the first time my father presented her, those callous eyes scoured every inch of my frame, first resting on my arms—then my chest—and then my face— Slowly memorizing each limb for frailty and weakness, at least I assume. My mouth went dry under her scrutiny, and my palms drenched themselves in an anxious sweat. And she knew it, for she narrowed her eyes as they encountered mine, quickly realizing how much they intimidated me. The ember brown became firelit at that delectable discovery she'd made.   
  
I suppose she was so anxious for my fear because she considered me a threat to her position in the household as my stepmother or my father's wife. Perhaps she knew that I questioned her motives early on—   
  
My baby sister the woman despised as well, even more than myself, I soon realized. When she first saw Relena's head resting against the coarse wool that lined the crib, noticed how peacefully the baby slept within the ribbed cage of the cradle--with little blonde ringlets nestling her soft, swollen lips that curled over her fingers— My stepmother glowered down at her with blanched fists as they clutched the crib's bars.   
  
"She's..." the woman hesitated with her word choice, snorting, "a **pretty** child." She sneered viciously and tightened the pins that held the two braided buns taut on the sides of her head, then snatched the blankets covering my sister's face. "A little too pretty for her own good," Une mused with impatient breaths, retracting her fingers from Relena's cheek as if the warmth from the baby's flesh scalded her. She brought them back to the cradle's edge.   
  
"A pret-**ty** child," she brokenly muttered while putting emphasis on the second syllable, starting to rock the cradle back and forth jarringly. My sister stirred and drowsily moaned in protest to the sudden, agitating motion.   
  
**_Back and forth. Back and forth_**.   
  
"Prettier than **all**," Une barked to the affright and sniffling babe whose chubby fingers tucked the edge of her blanket between her tiny lips. Her face scrunched and eyes teared in aggravation, at the veracity in the woman's ire. The witch's rune ruptured the morning with encrypted rage.   
  
**_Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. _**

_"When the bough breaks... _

**_Back and forth. Back and forth._**

_...the cradle will fall...   
  
**Back and forth. Back and forth.   
  
**...and down will come baby...   
  
**Back. Creeeeeeak. And forth. Creeeeeeak.   
**  
cradle and all."   
_  
  
My hands reached out for the cradle's bars, my fingers grabbing around the wood and halting the crib only moments before the basket turned over completely and sent Relena's susceptable body hurling to the floor. Still... like Mother's. Cracks. Of bones—   
  
My sister's shrill cries and pummeling fists still return and echo in my mind on quiet nights, making me revisit the past that I only wish to forget. I can see her wide and yowling mouth. See her little arms flail. Rewarding my guilt with more grief—   
  
I stood there hunched over the crib, still clutching the bars as Lady Une rose from the bedside with utter disgust written upon her face— From a plan well foiled. And as her boot heels scraped along the floorboards when she withdrew, she leisurely turned back to my crumpled form over the cradle, left me with a glare so caustic that I felt my throat seize and knees rattle from the venom. I even wet my pants, I was so frightened by her. And I was only able to recover once she vanished behind the doorway.   
  
She tried to kill her.   
  
I was sure of it. She had just tried to murder my baby sister in cold blood, and her only remorse was an expression more infamous than the deed itself. If I wouldn't have been there to stop the cradle's sway, Relena would have— No. No I couldn't let myself dwell on how close I was to losing her: my mother's last legacy. I would drown in that guilt and never accomplish anything. But I also couldn't allow myself to forget what that witch had attempted, regardless of the fear it instilled within me to recall the bitterness-- No, hatred that clouded her eyes. The revulsion she emanated when her gaze was set on my sister's face. I grappled with the absurd concept that a single person could have such intense enmity for a child that could not even as of yet speak. It seemed impossible.   
  
But I know what I saw.   
  
She would not be permitted to try such a stunt again, since I personally saw to it that she was never in the room with my sister alone, without me. Wherever the woman's eyes ventured mine were there beside hers. Whatever room she entered I followed. I was always there. Always watchful. Just waiting for her to pounce.   
  
Because I had to protect my baby sister. She was truly the virginal, chaste martyr in this witch's perverted plot, trying to be made a whore in the brothel of repugnance and covetousness. Relena, of all who dwelled in that house, didn't deserve that woman's vengeance. And if Une insisted that it weigh on Relena's breast, then it would have to be carried by mine first. I owed my sibling as much. However, I also knew that this promise would be easier to keep if I had Father's sympathy on my side, and therefore I was determined to prove to my father that he'd made a mistake in marrying her.   
  
But I never got a chance to tell him. The shrew thought of that, too.   
  
He died not even a month after their marriage. I found him in his tool shed one early winter's morning... with his carving knife sticking through his chest, blood seeping from his lips and making a puddle on the wooden floor. It tarnished the soles of my feet as I walked across the gory smear to lie beside him in that devastating, sepulchral shadow of dawn. The sunlight was mirrored in his unsettling, glassy eyes and washed out his skin. And I just stared into those eyes. Smelled rank death as I tugged on his chilled hand with my own, still vibrant one.   
  
Lifeless. Disturbing. Vacant, far-off gaze.   
  
I just lay there for hours, placed his left arm over my shoulder and snuggled against him, not caring about the smell— Until the dog laid down and lapped up the blood that had pooled between the corpse's legs. It licked my fingers, too... with a bloodied muzzle.   
  
It was atrocious.   
  
When asked about it, Stepmother claimed she saw him when he tripped over the loose floorboard the night before, falling directly on the blade.   
  
"It was so sad," she boredly mentioned while keeping her concentration on the book she was studying, her words laced with apathy, "that I couldn't bring myself to tell you about it earlier."   
  
_Flip of a page. Flip back._   
  
But I knew better. She killed him. She crept upon him that morning, took the knife from his workbench, and stabbed him in the chest, probably smiling as she was spattered with his blood that sullied the window behind them. Moaned when she heard his grunt of agony that she stifled with her hand against his bloodied, gaping mouth. Laughed as she speared him again and again in that darkness. Over twenty-seven times. But when I found him the blood was already smudged and rubbed into the wood— She licked it off the ground to satiate her lust for death, stroking the weapon clean with her tongue. I know it.   
  
But I don't know why she didn't kill Relena and I, too. With our father gone there was no one to protect us, and no one would even know we were missing. We were the children of a wood carver, poor and plain. Deaths of orphans weren't uncommon or highly prioritized, and so we were vulnerable targets. There was absolutely no threat of culpability for her.   
  
But she couldn't even spare us that. She couldn't even put us out of our damn misery. Not even that.   
  
Instead, she raised us like the dogs she always accused us of being-- Which, technically, shouldn't have been such an insult since the dog was the only thing she showed any sort of concern for. But apparently her sympathy didn't quite embrace the human animal.   
  
Her mongrel and her bitch, she often called us as we served her on command.   
  
She starved us unless we did as we were instructed, and needless to say, I went without food for many a day over the next seven years. But I always made sure Relena at least had something to eat daily, even if it involved me stealing from the pantry and being brutally lashed for the theft later. I eventually found a way around that, though: some of my best meals over that time came from the real dog's bowl.   
  
Maybe I was mongrel. But at least I wasn't a hungry one.   
  
It didn't matter, though, because despite Une's efforts to the contrary: dressing the poor girl in rags and smearing her in soot and cinder from the hearth, my sister grew more beautiful with every day and sweeter after every night. Her lengthy golden tresses spilled down her back and enhanced her cerulean eyes. They were bottomless gems sparkling with innocence and perseverance, making her pale skin glow like moonlight. She was a daughter of beauty; a lovely, premature maiden of pretty guise.   
  
Une was right: she was too beautiful for her own good. But I didn't care. Not then at least.   
  
Relena had our mother's spirit, too, always disobedient when it came to my commands. I remember Mother was always finding something else that seemed more important than her work to do, usually helping wounded animals or fixing a meal for some hungry beggar that happened to stumble on our doorstep— My father scolded her for that so many times; he claimed it wasn't safe. Then she'd just look down at me and press her finger to her lips, asking me to keep her charity a secret. I'd just smile and giggle, and Father would ask me what was so funny. And I'd say--   
  
Relena was no different. Whenever I needed her help the most she found some fawn to lie with in the fields or rehearsed a descant with a dove and tenor robin. They were certainly more interesting than a woodpile or raving older brother, I'd think.   
  
"The fawn had a tummy-ache earlier," she told me once after I sent her to find some medicinal herbs in the thicket nearby. She couldn't have been more than five at the time. "I had to give all the herbs I found to him, to help him feel better. He's okay now, so I can help you," Relena smiled playfully, pointing her little finger at me.   
  
Her smile. She always had a smile, one that flooded her eyes with illumined azure and put color in her cheeks. That sweet smile that called me to life every day was followed by the dulcet tones of some runic rhyme she sang while doing the chores beside me. An ancient song upon her lips when she milked the cow; a folk ballad while she gathered wood. They were just dispelling staves that wafted in the lazy afternoons, charming our forest to passivity and mesmeric sedation.  
  
But each time her breath formed itself into another haunting pitch my thoughts would wander to our Mother... and her voice that still caroled in my dreams, lyrics and sorrowful aria begging that I never forget.   
  
How could I forget, Mother, when with your final lament you breathed your own voice, your own song into your daughter's breast? I hear you in every note she holds, every lyric she utters. I can never forget you.   
  
You won't let me.

---------  
  
I could have easily left the shrew's "care" with Relena at my side when my father died; he taught me the basics of survival. I could manage. But that would have been selfish.   
  
It must be understood that I endured our stepmother's torture for Relena's sake. She hadn't known our mother or how eternal a mother's love could be, even when taken away; and I figured that even a neglectful mother's affection (or lack thereof) was better than none at all.   
  
But I was wrong.   
  
And that misjudgment almost cost me everything that day: the afternoon of Relena's twelfth birthday. It's a memory that still bothers me even now... a remembrance I can't escape and will never let myself forget—retribution for the sin of cowardice. Punishment I so unintentionally yet fervently earned. I brought it on myself, with my fanciful ideas of change and thinking that a female body could replace our mother.   
  
Idiotic.   
  
With money I'd earned from helping the men in town mend fences or run simple errands, I bought a small chocolate tart for Relena to commemorate the occasion. I'd been saving for months, due partially to the fact that Stepmother found the coins I hoarded under my mattress and confiscated them. She compensated me for her thievery in full, though— Repaying the sum in sound lashings. An equivalence in blood-let. I therefore had to start the process all over again, but this time I never let the coins leave my person. I learned my lesson well.   
  
It was worth every extra callous on my hands from the labor and scar on my back from the guilder's whip, because when I handed the cake to my sister, she with wide, amazed eyes that blinked incredulously at the pastry— Her lower lip began to tremble. She fought a duel of smiles and tears. Her eyes glistened as the sun showered her from the window in a golden haze. Lathered her in innocence. Truly innocence.   
  
After taking a nibble of the dessert, licking her lips of the icing and pokily savoring such a rare delicacy, she was benevolent enough to grace me with her blessed smile, one that passed surely from cheek to cheek. There was a faint blush from the sweetest heart, mixed with the gooey decadence on the edges of her mouth. Her eyes glittered happily. And it was at that moment, for the first time since Mother's death, that I felt my heart skip a beat, leaving me warm and breathless in that simple instant. Calm. Weightless and content. It was a sensation I missed so much but was denied for so long that I almost didn't recognize it when it came over me.   
  
I realized then, soft as a hummingbird's stride.   
  
I loved her.   
  
The way her hair tangled in the breezes of winter as she made angels in the snow, how her laugh tinkled like little silver bells amongst the pines, and the warmth of her fingers as she held my hand on our quiet evening walks through the glen— I only forgot Stepmother and her abuse when Relena was by my side.   
  
Relena— She was my mother's dying breath made flesh. She was my last living blood relative. She was all I had.   
  
So that afternoon I let my guard down and kissed her cheek as tenderly as I could, my heart aflame with her love for me and mine for her. She returned the gesture quite evenly, smearing my cheek with the chocolate smudges that were all over her mouth--then smothered all over mine. It was disgusting, actually, but the fudge disaster was worth the feeling of her soft mouth pressed against my cheek. Our affection was cradled by the sun and added to out closeness--   
  
That's when Stepmother walked in and noticed the piece of cake in Relena's hand.   
  
Her eyes were saturated by fear and unsettled with the ocean's ravaged temper that churned violently amid usually gentle blue. My sister's breath caught at the presence of the woman and her jaw went slack; she was so startled by Une's vehemence that she dropped the tart to the floor and stumbled back. It was then that I stepped forward to halt the shrew's passage. But she continued to advance with anger scorched across her countenance at each new step.   
  
At sixteen, I easily towered over the slight witch that approached me dangerously, her eyes glinting with a hatred she focused solely on the girl whose whispers warmed my back. It was a glare of fiery pledge. Of pending violence. The brown-haired wretch shoved another hairpin into her tight, fastened buns and raised her nails at Relena. She revealed the claws she would use to rip the ingested pastry from my sister's stomach.   
  
This woman lusted for my father. For his blood. And now she was filled with similar passion to see that red river flowing again. From his daughter's veins.   
  
It was so pitiful. I could've broken the woman in two if I'd only tried— But I couldn't move. My body was frozen in the range of those eyes—those demonic spheres that flickered with the corruption of danmnation against the sunlight, I swear it. Those that burned into Relena's breast and choked the courage from my veins in simmering sweat and hellion skin. I had never known fear... until I saw that paralytic glare set upon us.   
  
The only physical challenge I made against her approach was the hair on my neck that stood erect at the thud of her footsteps on the rotten wood. Rigid in my stance. I just let the woman seethe. Let her grind the cake into the floor with her boot heel. Allowed her to pull my sister away from me... my mind screaming... heart pounding when the my sister's eyes widened from terror and shock. That I didn't stop the hellish dame.   
  
Before I could even react, Stepmother had backhanded the milk-white skin of Relena's cheek with so much force that the poor girl's body lurched to the ground, followed by a sickening, earsplitting crack. Broken echo. A condemned resonance that hugged the stagnancy.   
  
So many mistakes. So little sleep I've known for them.   
  
And I let her do it. Watched her do it. I. Let. Her. Strike my Relena— Without even putting up a fight. I failed my baby sister. Because of fear. Because of simple fear. Unwarranted fear.   
  
I can barely remember as I helped my sister to her knees, with her brittle form trembling and twitching when I pulled her close to me. She had every right to be scared in my arms and visibly wince from the pain, since I couldn't protect her. I deserved to see that torture and have it branded on my memory. What good was my embrace if it couldn't protect her?   
  
I somehow found the gall to look into Relena's eyes, and it was at that moment when I noticed a sleek, runny trail of blood mar her dazed face. It was a deep, angry scrape that marked her cheek where the witch smote her. The blood ran down onto her lips. Bitter and ravenous. Like a scarlet serpent that ate away at her flesh.   
  
Instinctively, I looked over at the woman's hand when she pulled it back to her body and noticed her silver wedding ring coated in my sister's blood, which slithered through the wench's fingers. My _mother's_ wedding ring.   
  
My vision went black. I was completely blinded by my rage as I let my virulence spread its poison into my thoughts and muscles. My hands shook in my anger-- That she scarred my sister with our mother's ring. A symbol of love was used as a tool for the will of hatred.   
  
I was going to kill her. Someway, somehow I was going to kill that witch. I knew it. I couldn't control myself. If I didn't escape from the anger forcibly coursing through me—if I didn't put distance between us. And so as night came to the woods that late summer day, I took my sister and fled our home. Never to return. Never to look back.   
  
But we couldn't leave... she wouldn't let us go. Even when we were out of her line of sight she watched us, stalking the woods for us with that fiendish gaze. She burned it into our memories even as we sprinted through the trees; narrowed those eyes and then opened them wide in a flash of triumph at her power. Her laughter chased us through the darkness as we ran deeper and more desperately into the thicket, with the relentless shadow of her scowl glowing behind every withered shrub and slumped patch of greenery that we passed. She tried to scare us back to the house. They reached out for us; servant trees possessed by her glare grabbed at my tunic with their lower, finger-like branches and showered us with leaves, trapping us in a foliaged net. Every set of eyes that gleamed tallow in the moonlight seemed to be hers; every silhouette that navigated across the terrain belonged to that woman. Her form just waited to seize her prey and bring it back home to feast upon our fear. Damned she-wolf. Scavenger.   
  
I ran through the brush wildly, not knowing where I was going. I was running away from the cottage, where she was, and that alone was enough. I just tried to find any trace of light that could lead me away from that stare of burnished copper— But it never appeared. Relena was dragged mercilessly behind me, splattering her gown with mud and grass and pollen. It couldn't be helped. I had to escape—we had to escape. With our lives.   
  
I awoke the next morning to find Relena and myself huddled together against the bark of an old maple tree; the fresh dew skimmed our bodies and chilled our naked skin, refeshing us. But how we got there, I couldn't recall. My mind was a blur of the events of the previous evening, an utter haze of black, blue, and sinister yellow eyes that continued to plague my dreams. Even when lying beneath the safe, concealing gown of the tree's ruffage. Nothing seemed certain anymore: not the trees surrounding us, not the grass I sat on, nor my own memories. Everything was strange. Intimidating. My own mind betrayed me.   
  
My body flinched involuntarily as I felt Relena snuggle even deeper into my shoulder for warmth. Her lips were iced with a pale blue film from the cool of the dawn and she absently slid her tongue along her mouth, wetting that cold flesh. In my haste, I'd pulled my sister from her bed, which left her that morning dressed only in her nightgown. There was nothing else but that gauzy fabric to keep the gusts from gnawing at her skin or perhaps worse.   
  
So I had to be objective: we needed to find shelter soon. Otherwise I knew the chilled nights and equally cool mornings would come to take a toll on her, so thin and delicate as it was. It might even begin to affect me if enough time elapsed. Food would become a concern as well in a couple of days, but it was best to resolve these matters before our bodies began to suffer from neglect, while we still had the most stamina and will.   
  
With a soft pat on her shoulder I roused my sister, and she slowly opened her eyes and lifted them to mine.   
  
"We need to find a place to stay tonight, and I don't know this region of the forest very well," I confessed as my eyes wandered to the trees around us in search of something I recognized. But there was nothing. The woods were quiet here, absent of the cries and calls of the phantom youth that stalked our glen. The winds were calm of their laughter, grasses undisturbed by their footsteps. They weren't near. "We'll have to start searching now if we want any hope of being sccessful... or surviving." The last statement was more of a murmur than a declaration, but from the way her eyes sought mine as I mentioned it, I knew she must have heard me.   
  
I'll admit that telling her such things probably frightened her more than motivated, especially my choice of words that grew colder and more monotonous with every one. I stole her from her bed the night before, dragging her through the brush in a sleepy haze and stopping beneath a dampened maple. It was probably more like a dream to her than anything else. But my words were harsh realities, things that although she may not have wanted to know, deserved to be made aware of.

---------  
  
It wasn't until the early afternoon that we finally came across a stream and its lazy gurgles that wafted on the breeze, keeping rhythm with the steady flap of birds' wings and the pant of a rogue fox that skulked about the water for laggard drinks. The rivulet's face scintillated seductively as the sunlight caressed the rippling glass that beckoned to be touched, to be disturbed by a man's fingers as he licked the water from them in a carnal craving. It looked so delicious.   
  
We stood over the water, faces reflected back as we looked into the crystal mirror to find our own eyes watching us. Bodies dirty and gaunt. Hair tousled from sleep and constant winds.   
  
My thoughts were distracted from our reflections as the murmur of the brook once more called to me to look at it, so thirsty as I was from walking those hours in the midst of the day's heat. Wetting my lips with my tongue, I knelt down to gather a pool of the water into my hands for a drink, with fluid dripping through my fingers as I raised it to my mouth.   
  
But my lips remained dry, because Relena grab my hands desperately. Her grip was stern. Firm. Her eyes stoic as she reached for me. Her golden hair skimmed the water when the wind brushed it from against her back.   
  
"You mustn't," she bayed me as her hold on my wrist trembled while lifting her other hand from the water, capturing my fingers with it. "You can't get a drink here. It's not safe." She bowed her head for a moment and turned away from me, her tresses falling over her shoulders as the wind carried them across her face, hiding her eyes from me in splitting plies of amber. Her gaze searched the depths of the stream, slowly as though looking for something. Waiting patiently for her target. But it didn't seem to appear, since she came back to look at me. "It told me so."   
  
My facial muscles didn't move. I stayed there, silent, waiting for her to go on.   
  
"There was a voice..." she began a bit hesitantly and licked her bottom lip as the air whistled over it, "... when you were running to the stream, I heard a voice. It sounded like an echo, but its words were too clear for it to be that.   
  
"I was originally going to ignore it," Relena reasoned with herself as she spoke, glancing for a moment to the left—and then behind. Unsure, as though contemplating what she thought she heard. "But it said something strange... something that made me shiver when I heard it.   
  
_He who drinks from the water's chill   
  
Shall be fashioned a tiger by his will   
_  
  
"I know it's crazy, but... I couldn't let you drink and take that risk. You might have transformed into a tiger, and you would have devoured me and been left here alone— With me in pieces in your stomach," she choked, her whisper fading as the thought consumed her.   
  
From the look in her eyes, I could tell what she was thinking— White fur streaked with sable rushing past her and a mouth full of fangs closing around her throat as she cries out. Her neck snaps. Then dead silence.   
  
She laid her cheek upon my shoulder as she knelt beside me in the rill, her breathing soon calm, relieved that I still wielded the body of a man... and that of her brother.   
  
Her allegations were ridiculous. I realized that. But the peace that descended upon her eyes in a serene gaze of azure, how she simply breathed and that gentleness kept the chill from my skin— They stopped me from pursuing the matter further, mute to argument.   
  
And so I lowered my head in that defeat and hoisted myself back onto my feet, reaching out my hand to pull Relena from the stream's bed. The bottom of her soaked gown dribbled along the grass, causing those blades to sparkle with the sunbeams as I led her back to the trail.   
  
I could wait. For her, I could wait.

---------  
  
Not even two hours later, I heard splashing coming from a nearby lake. Its waters teemed with swans as the new, proud mothers coaxed their babies into the shallow slough. The cobs weren't readily cooperative, however, taking refuge beneath the parents' wings and breaking into fits when the mothers nudged the little ones with their beaks. Pearlshine feathers floated on the sheer surface, lifted by the breeze then dropped as the current broke, misting us in downy snow. Wind rushed through the feathers of these slender-necked creatures, a shushing sound as it sailed along their backs.   
  
Cautious of the young ones skittering across the water, I walked through the liquid until it was up to my calf, haunching over on my knees with one arm supporting me. I lowered myself to the pond and took a handful of it in my palm, while Relena lagged behind. She took hesitant, slow steps toward the water—turning her head this way and that amidst the sunlight... listening for something. Lost in down.   
  
My tongue was parched. My mouth was dry. And that's why I was so reluctant to listen to my sister when she begged me to stop once again, this time calling to me from the shore.   
  
With apprehension lacing her plea, wringing her milk-white hands at bothering me again, she bayed, "You can't drink from this one either, Milliardo! The voice warned me about this one, too!" She ran down to the edge of the lake; the splashes she made circled her in watery iridescence as they twinkled in the sunlight. The glassy beads kssed the ends of her hair as she neared. "It didn't say the same thing as last time, though. It changed it a little.   
  
_He who consumes this fluid rare   
  
Shall scavenge by the wolf's lone prayer_   
  
"A wolf, this time. You would tear me limb from limb and be tempered by the moon."   
  
I was dying of thirst. Just completely desperate for anything to relieve me that the only thing I could think about was how wonderful the water would feel as it slid down my throat and showered the dust on my tongue. I wasn't convinced.   
  
Her chest heaving, she came further into the water, falling another time to her knees as she beckoned, "Let's just return to the path and find another place to drink. I'm sure there's one around here." I was just so thirsty, though, and the water glittered so tantalizingly in my palms that my tongue dove down to lap it up without my consent.   
  
We had been walking the entire day with nothing to drink, and even she was beginning to wear on my patience.   
  
Her scream… shrill as it tore across the day, terror-stricken as it resounded over rocks and trees— Startled me enough that I reflexively let the fluid drip from between my fingers before I could taste, watching sadly as it joined the rest of the water beneath me, as if I'd never held it. Water could be so fickle about who it chose to be its drinker.   
  
I was not pleased.   
  
Keeping my eyes on hers as I raised my head from over my hands, I walked over to her wide-eyed figure, yanked her to her feet as I brought her so close to my face that her nose touched mine, and whispered in my most callous monotone, "No voice will stop me from drinking at the next spring, even when you're its messenger. I hope you'll understand."   
  
We traveled the woods in silence after that.

---------  
  
Evening came with feathered, fiery clouds and purple hues, and my eyes caught sight of a small lakelet only a few feet off the path.   
  
I closed my ears to all other sound but the babbling of the pond as it murmured against the bank, attentive to the timbre of its collision on the muddy grass and followed by the humming of the winds through the branches. Relena's screams were drowned by that luring melody.   
  
In ravenous gulps I ingested the liquid, relishing the chill that had settled over the gully as evening set in, and I couldn't help but close my eyes in satisfaction as my tongue ceased to stick to the back of my teeth and lubricated the roof of my mouth.   
  
I tried to turn around to show my sister that I was fine, and she too had nothing to fear from the creek— When my stomach lurched as it tried to dispel the accursed drink. My mouth sealed against my abdomen's rejection, preventing me from retching the offal. My tongue involuntarily washed the refuse to the back of my mouth, forcing down my gag reflex and inducing me to swallow it along with a wave of bile that stung my throat as the disgusting spice slid back down— But not before trying to come up again. My lips quivered as the spew settled back in my stomach, leaving me breathless and vulnerable to the pain that began to well in my temples. It spread down my back—through my arms—into my thighs—grappling with my chest. All in a matter of moments.   
  
_He who drinks _  
  
Feeling my knees buckle, I couldn't do anything to stop my fall except shove my arms out to brace myself— But they weren't my arms anymore.   
  
_Of this water clear_   
  
My fingers were fusing together into one single entity, turning the same color as the black muck at the bottom of the water's bed, and my chest crested in a mane of alabaster white seemed weighed down. It was so heavy that it forced me back on my hands and knees— I couldn't stand. My torso, my shoulders— They were just too heavy. My once blonde hair turned auburn as the sun scorched it; rust-colored strands crept along my shoulders and back to coat the rest of my body in an intense copper shade. I felt the water seep through the fur and tingle the skin beneath.   
  
_Shall sired be_   
  
A searing pain wrenched my skull just above the ears. Everything went dark and silent for an instant, torment suspended and all feeling lost to me as my eyes rolled into the back of my head. I only fainted for a moment from the strain... but it wouldn't be merciful and and leave me be. It gnawed at my dormant soul, resurrecting me from sleep and back into its clutches. There was only pain and the echoing of my breath in my ears, screaming against my heartbeat. Threatening darkness.   
  
My neck strained in trying to hold up my head, weighed down by a set of velvet antlers that cast shadows over my reflection in the lake. I released a rough groan from my breast as I tried to call out to Relena on the shore.   
  
_The ever-silent seer_   
  
I was a roebuck. A roebuck drenched in human sweat. Cursed by the water of the lake in which I lay.   
  
I couldn't breathe. I could barely think when the moans muffled by my sister's hands over her mouth resonated in my ears, when the wind laughed at my stubborn ignorance. It caused slight ripples in the enchanted rivulet as the breeze rushed over it. More cackles. More chuckling.   
  
I couldn't even look at her I was so ashamed. I didn't trust her— My Relena with her precious smile and lovely song. Betrayed her faithful hymn to me.   
  
Our mother's dying canticle.   
  
So I ran. Darted through the reeds and fallen twigs so I wouldn't have to see the pity in her eyes as I faded into the brush. Alone. No more forgetting the sorrow as I stood by her side. No more love for her to give.   
  
I was clumsy in my new shape, tripping over my slender legs and having trouble balancing on the hooves; my antlers caught in the lower brush as I struggled to flee. Rotten logs of musty foliage hindered my sprint. But I had to get away, find a place where I could think this through, where memories would leave me in peace... before I could face Relena again.   
  
I just needed to be alone.   
  
My new instincts were already taking hold as my hooves led me to a desolate meadow. And after slowing to a gentle gallop, I began to give in to my impulses as they beckoned me: losing myself in the tall grasses and stoic against the breeze as it tousled my fur. Anonymous. Unseen. Safe when out of the eyesight of another. I could feel myself breathe again.   
  
It was amongst this solitude that Relena's voice shattered the silence, her cry resounding from the hollowed trunks and once blooming petals that withered at the pitch— To leave the forest brown and lifeless, a graveyard of earthen tombs with the shriek of lost souls whistling through the branches.   
  
The wraiths of children dwelled here, but they didn't share their requiem with the ones I knew. These children— Their spirits were wandering from a reaper of hell, trying to run from sin itself. I knew, for the nocturne that they chanted killed even the sun as its glow faded with each lyric they breathed, each time their lips parted. They kneeled on the ground with their hands joined in a demonic ring, heads thrown back as they sang to their dreary, satanic fate.   
  
_Scorched skin in flaming fire   
  
Surrendering forever   
  
Evil once so evil now   
  
Condemned in curse's ire _  
  
These were souls of the damned... those pitiful ghosts who scavenged the earth for more abandoned, naive phantoms they could drag to their condemnation. And they were waiting for Relena's soul to join them. Their circle was a cry to her spirit, to guide her to damnation if the soul severed from her body was so tempted. She was in danger of death.   
  
I had to protect her. It didn't matter what had happened before. I wouldn't allow her to suffer because of my vanity. By God, this place of strewn petals with a promise of demise would not be her grave— It too closely resembled our mother's.   
  
I found myself praising my keen senses this time as I left those disturbed specters and their dirge in the distance, my ears leading me directly to her body curled up amongst the leaves. Rocking back and forth with sobs muffled by her sleeves. She trembled as she heard me approach her, stirring the leaves to a soft crunching and choking on her whisper as she pleaded, "No. Please. Leave me alone. What have I. Done?"   
  
I lay down beside her in the brush, setting my velvet cheek upon her hair, trying to calm her. Her shoulders flinched when she felt my touch, a gasp escaping from her lips to testify to her fear. But that quickly subsided when she pressed her forehead against my fur, wrapping her arms around my neck as she realized it was me who was beside her. No danger threatened her anymore.   
  
The children had stopped.   
  
"She was here," Relena finally broke the silence and absently stroked the fur around my face. Her eyes were intense and open but staring at nothing. "Lady Une was here. She tried to kill me." My ears perked.   
  
Relena was quiet again, though, removing her right hand from my face and bringing it to her neck, rubbing it softly. "I was going to run after you after you'd... changed. But when I turned to follow you, she was there. And. She was holding water from the lake.   
  
"'Your brother should have listened to my warning, and now he's been punished for his stubbornness,' she told me, and she just kept staring at me, holding that water. Then she stepped closer. Her eyes just stared at the water in her hand. And she mocked me, saying, 'Wouldn't it be fitting to have a matching pair of deer for me to hunt? I think it would.' She brought the water up to my face, and I stumbled back into the lake and fell on the hem of my dress. She knelt down in front of me, and she thrust the water to my lips. But before I drank, she brought her hand back and decided, 'No. It would be better if I finished you off here and now... so your brother can come back to find your body lifeless.'   
  
"She lunged towards me, taking my throat in her hands and tried to wring the life from my breast. She was too strong, her hold on me so tight... but then she let go. And you appeared, and..." the phantom stains of the hag's fingertips still lingered on her throat as she recalled the tale, staining her neck in an angry red memory. The witch must have used her sorcery to vanish when she heard me coming, because Relena seemed perfectly alone when I neared the pond.   
  
"No one can hurt you anymore, because I'm here to protect you— I will always protect you," I whispered while resetting my cheek upon her hair, the scent of pine needles wafting up to my nostrils and coaxing my muscles to relax. Somehow, despite Une's witchcraft, Relena could still understand me. Or perhaps she just knew me well enough to understand my devotion to her. No words needed to assume my feelings.   
  
"And I will protect you. My Roe," she laughed slightly at the title while using the back of her hand to caress my forehead. Relena then slipped the garter off her leg and fastened it around my neck like a collar: a golden collar with the buds of roses twined around the silk. A noble sash for my neck. "Now I can tell you apart from the other deer in the forest."

---------  
  
No sooner had we left the lake than we found an abandoned cottage on the outskirts of the bracken. It was an austere dwelling with only one room, and hay covered the floor and some of the wood was warped by the rains. But would keep out the draft and shelter us from the cold well enough. That was all we needed.   
  
We spent over six years in that home, growing up together without the outside world to bother us. It was a simple life, yes, but it was a happy one filled with love and warmth between us. Une seemed like nothing more than a distant memory over that time, since her eyes left our dreams and her shadow no longer haunted the trees at twilight. We could want nothing more. We were free. We had peace.   
  
And then my little Relena, my baby sister, found love. Or something close to it.


	2. Foreshadowing

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or "Brother and Sister."   
  
_The little boy with wild brown hair looked up to the sky as rain began to fall unto the earth, the watery beads dripping from his wrists and down the slope of his neck in shimmering, fluent shackles. They enslaved him to the past's degenerate overseer, that of a child's recollection of this breeding ground, this forest of gory memories and bitter, carnal devastation. The droplets whipped his back, water slapping his face and wiping the blood that testified to his earlier abuse. Hiding his gashes behind a sheet of rain; covering his scrapes with the storm's sterile mists. Flesh of cuts and bruises and pants of ragged breath.   
  
His midnight blue eyes searched through the fog of gray and black to find the star that promised to guide him home, pentangle of all weary travelers— But the North Star was not to be followed on such a day when tempests cradled the land in darkness and cold. It was a day when the woods consumed children's souls that wandered alone amongst its gallows, lost and orphaned both. Squalls that waited to lynch them in the arbors' lower boughs of ugly, twisted fingers, to strangle them in dangling ivy and make them disappear. Their screams could still be heard amidst the leaves, their cries for a mother being lost as the wind grew stronger. Drowning their last hope for redemption.   
  
The thief had come upon the two so fast, his father saddling their horses for their journey home and unaware of the assailant hidden amidst the trees, armed with an arrow pulled back to fire. The king didn't even have time to react before the tip found its place in the small of his back, blood trickling from the wound and dampening the earth below as the prince's father fell to the soil with a grunt and spew of blood. Splashing mud unto the highwayman's feet and calves. Staining them in burnt, red spatters.   
  
A knife unveiled. More wounds. More gore. More groans and screams. A gasp... and then the child was alone. Father gone. No horses. No way home.   
  
Alone. Abandoned of human company.   
  
He had only the companionship of the Guiding Star for a few short hours before the storm erupted over the brush, deafening him as the thunder cried; blinding him as lighting wrapped its chains about the sky and flogged him with its numinous might... drenching him as the droplets came. Without that celestial savior this boy knew he couldn't find his way back to the castle. He could see only water and light and flickering blackness. But he walked on regardless, wading through lakes now enraged by the assault of the wind upon their glassy faces. Foaming surges churned, to wrap him in their depths as they sought retribution for the tempestuous abuse they suffered— On his little body. He scaled the ridges that he passed, the cliffs nipping at his toes as his feet became stuck between the rocks, licking at his fingers to make him lose his grip and plunge to the grass below. Only so that he could climb the stones again.   
  
He was exhausted. Desperate for sleep. His scrawny legs shook as they tried to carry him across the meadows and through the trees that scorned him of shelter from the downpour. He needed to stop... just lay his head upon the leaves... succumb to darkness. But he couldn't rest. He had to get home. His father had ordered him to run home, to survive... as the attacker stabbed the king repeatedly, using the blade to gouge his eyes from their sockets, blind to the pain his son would suffer. Sadistic mercy._   
_  
But it was just so far.   
  
The prince collapsed beneath a naked tree, even in the midst of summer its branches were bare to leave him victim to the chill of the rain. The mud splashed on his face and into his mouth as the ground received him. He wheezed dark brown sludge, caking his lips in loose mire. He was cold. He was tired. His father was murdered right in front of him, the man's blood spattered in his hair and sodden in his long lashes, leaving crimson strokes beneath his eyes when he blinked. Branding streaks. Blood on his once chaste hands, red dried in his palms' creases and beneath his nails. Layered with the guilt of helplessness.   
  
Perhaps if he closed his eyes he would die too, or at least find himself somewhere besides the dank shade of an old tree's skeleton-- As frail as his father when he died.   
  
But the specter of the king watched the boy from afar, sighing as he saw the child fall to the ground so weary of such a trial as he faced, one so young. The screams of the starving ghost kin drew nearer as the prince did not stir, their translucent figures appearing in the branches above to look down upon their newest sibling as they reached out their hands to him. They called his soul forth.   
  
The man looked to the figure that stood beside him, eyes downcast as he nodded his head in agreement to the old man's offer earlier rejected.   
  
**"You can save my son?" the dead man asked of the other with silver hair and a claw in place of palm and finger. The king was not one to easily trust another… but his child was dying-- And he could not interfere. For the worlds of the dead and living create such a delicate balance, one which even the most nominal prayer can tilt-- With the penalty of damnation, to be dragged into the very last circle of hellion bowels. Those cryptic children its keeper.   
  
"I can," the elder replied simply, his long hair tousled in the breeze that ran passed. "But if I'm going to do something for your child, then he will have to do something for my daughter in repayment."   
  
"Never..."**_

_"What will Heero need to do to compensate you, Jay?"   
  
"It's not something he can do right now... but perhaps years down the road," the old man explained as he opened the claw and then clenched the metal together quickly, his thick spectacles glinting through the shadows the storm had cast upon his face. "And let my just say that it's not something I particularly wish to be involved in. Rather, my wife, Lady Une, will arrange everything in time."   
  
And so the pact was made.   
  
As the king bowed his head in his son's fate, his lips moved in a silent prayer to God that He spare his child of the commitment as time would pass-- That condemnation may befall him rather than the ignorant, abandoned child. The phantom kith turned their heads away from this boy whose heart still beat, and vanished in the mist of the new dawn. Their laughter faded. Their mourning echoed further.   
  
The prince was lifted into the old man's arms who carried him home, left him sleeping on the castle's drawbridge that evening, where two of the sentinels found him.   
  
The deed was done. A contract made.   
  
When the boy was cradled in the soldier's arms, safe and alive, it sealed a pact, one that doomed the boy's hand to the daughter of the stranger ... even though his heart was meant for another. Though Fate had thought otherwise.   
  
His father's word had spared him from death that night... but he also denied his son the child's destiny._


	3. Fated Meeting

AN: Finally... Heero meets Relena (it's taken long enough, hasn't it?), with a pretty explicit lime coming up in the next chapter. Enjoy!!! Thanks for all of the reviews!

Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."

The summer in which my sister turned eighteen, a very young and relentless prince inherited the throne of the kingdom just outside our woods. It was rumored that he and his father were attacked one afternoon on a hunting venture, and while the former king was later found wallowing in his own blood, the prince survived. The corpse of the monarch was mutilated, cut, sliced, and butchered, with the eyes pried out of the skull, leaving empty sockets that dripped with fat and rotting meat.

Fate took him by the hand and led him home that stormy night, I would overhear the woodsmen say as I stood unbeknownst to them in the tall grass of the fields, feeding on the weeds made fresh by the morning's rain. Some claimed that one of the soldiers who found him actually saw the decrepit figure of the Demon as She laid the almost lifeless boy upon the bridge. Through the mist Her shiney, bony fingers clinched and then released as She disappeared into the dimness of the fog, a hunchback shadow vanishing from human eyes. But that was merely legend, a tale fabricated to add some excitement to the droll lives of the villagers, such drudgery they toiled from dusk to following dawn. There was no validity to such a claim, and I doubt there ever will be. It was a mystery, one that not even the king himself could answer or chose not to—be that as it may. Not even he could recall how he managed his return.

But one thing was sure: he was avid for revenge against the man that slew his father and robbed the cadaver of its sight, defaming the former king's body as well as royalty's honor. And so he threw himself into the disciplines and brutality of the military and learned the finer points of swordsmanship. He waged war where negotiation would have sufficed, adding dominion after dominion to his already substantial empire. One body after another.

At first his subjects thought this yearn for vengeance would ebb as the seasons came and passed, degenerating in his memory to be nothing more than a child's immature, embodied nightmare. He would then be able to grant forgiveness where revenge could not be had.

But it didn't.

He slaughtered more men, conquered more lands as he followed the trail to that long lost murderer, soon brooding in apathy and an ally with retributive holocaust as he intensified his search. "The Perfect Soldier" they called him as he reigned in battle victoriously upon his warhorse wild. He called the beast Wing Zero, for upon the creature's back the prince flew across the fields, leaving no man standing as he held out his blade, ready to polish it in human flesh. A man— One callous to his fellow warriors' screams and the tragedy of familial wailing, and all remorse hidden behind a face as stoic as stone. It only crumbled with his glare, one that foretold the death of its onlooker in an expanse of Prussian paralysis. Cold amidst the warmth of blood, extinguishing the heat of widows' tears. His mind was only focused on the battle and its end. Nothing more.

Then finally, six years after the incident, he met face to face with the man he killed so many others for. His ultimate victim. He brought the traitor to his knees and plunged the sword into the man's back, bracing himself with a foot upon the crumpled pile of meat. The Perfect Soldier slowly, torturously slid the blade from the man's flesh, letting the blood spray the wife and child that stood watching in the corner of the hovel. Quaking, squealing, terrified as they were with Heero's cruelty--not knowing of the slain man's crime. He then brought the drooling saber to the murderer's throat and made an exploited, jagged slit. Not clean. Not precise. Just painful. No more than a merciless act.

And then this prince turned to the woman and shrieking babe that was squirming in her arms. There was a plea. The sheen of metal. Wailing. Groaning. Stifling. With a silence robed in blood.

It was a robe he was doomed to wear, perhaps not on his skin but deep within himself... in a place where at that moment, when his chest heaved raggedly over what he'd done, his heart stood still. He was drenched in their blood, reeked of saltwater and spoilage. This boy was smeared in innocence's beseech for forgiveness. In the dark red color of love's cry against hatred and reprisal.

It's ironic, though, for he had, in slaying oblivious mother and child, killed that little boy who years ago watched that same malice claim his father. The prince, so blinded by resentment, murdered himself that day.

He would never forget, never be pardoned. He wouldn't allow it. It's so pitiful, that he had his vengeance, and the murderer still held victory in his stiffened fingers. Heero couldn't obtain it, since the clutch of a corpse is futile to pry open, heartless to sorrow once the heart within stops beating.

This knowledge kept the monarch enslaved to the past with the blood on his own two hands, making gory chains around his wrists that never loosened... always choked him harder when he tried to forget. Each time he glanced down at his hands the blood became redder and deeper and more engulfing. It stained his skin and glowed with the ferocity of his guilt, lapping at his entire being. He was haunted by his carnage, which jarred him from sleep in a cold sweat that chilled his body and soul.

This king mourned alone, repressing his grief like he had done those years before, breathing a word to no one about the slaughter. He felt it was the only sacrifice he could make to atone for his ruthlessness: to suffer more extensively than they had. So he damned himself and filled his heart and mind with grief and insatiable reproach.

It consumed him and overflowed.

People eventually learned of what happened, and the legend spread quickly. It was inevitable. The bodies were left there in his shock-- Someone had to find them. But people didn't hear it from him. No— Never from him.

---------

Supposedly, in honor of the prince's coronation, the court announced a three-day hunt as, I guess, a sort of commemoration to the fact that the former king had died while doing just the same, that which had been his favorite sport. The man who took down the largest beast would dine beside the new king at the banquet immediately following the chase, a feast prepared from the kill's meat. It would have been a noble honor for any man.

But not for me.

I may have been a man once before and still within, but now the beast came before the man, a slave to my instincts as they sometimes surpassed my better judgment. It was a curse to be so vulnerable to those primitive, animalistc senses, but I learned to use my human guile to my advantage when in the field, to keep from being the prey of "stronger" creatures. Wolves had nothing on me; they were merely ceremonial, moon stalking cravens. And their cousin foxes couldn't tease me without getting my hoof in their mouths as a retort-- That usually subdued them for a while. Whether they had teeth and claws or not, I could never acknowledge myself as being a weaker animal than those sniveling cowards that skulked away as I approached the forest stream. Their ferocity was more reptuation than actual.

And being the roebuck that I was, I couldn't resist the seductive, almost sultry pant of the hounds as they scoured for prey long into the midnight hour. The hunters chased on their heels, as the risen moon brought forth the curs' more feral nature; their eyes and fangs glinted wildly in the darkness. Their howls and warning barks resonated for man and wolf kin alike, with their ode to the moon sending chills down my spine when it echoed over the hillside—delicious shudders that tingled of defiance and beckoned me to challenge the whelps' cunning. The clatter of horses' hooves upon the undergrowth wooed me to cross their tracks, since the beasts' whinnies grew scarce as dusk stilled the forest to a faint lull. I could elude their tired steps easily.

The call of predator to prey rushed through me delectably as I watched the horsemen in the distant brush, my yearn to join them in the chase only becoming more urgent as I saw a hare slip through the canines' clutches before the dogs could give the fatal nip. Every nerve in my body hinted its need to run alongside those beasts, to lure them in and out of vagrant trees, to _outwit_ them. It was my duty as the prey.

I told Relena what I desired, how I had to obey my natural instincts as those animals did theirs— But she would hear none of my excuses. She'd become more willful over the past few years, probably due to the fact that Stepmother was no longer there to intimidate her with the whip.

Then again, she was always one to stand up for her principles and the welfare of others--even if they had only been animals.

"Milliardo," she scolded me while my ears perked up at the patter of the dogs as they sprinted through the dirt and leaves, stirring dust into the rays of the midday sun. Her hands were set firmly at her sides as she tried to get my attention—the light from the window just out of reach of her hair, casting shadows on her troubled face. "Whether or not you look like a man, you are one. So you should think about what you're asking me a little more rationally and stop giving in to your primitive side.

"You want me to let you step foot out of this house and get yourself killed. How reckless does that sound to you, now that you hear me say it?"

I heard the horses follow those whelps in the distance, not really what she said as well. Or at least it didn't register in my mind.

"There aren't just one or two hunters out there. There's at least over twenty, and that's just around here— Let alone on the other side of the woods."

What was she saying? It didn't really matter.

"I gave you my word that I would protect you, Milliardo. That I would do what I can to stop you from being the victim of meaningless sport. But how can I possibly keep that promise if you throw yourself in front of danger— Purposely?"

I could have been out there, being hunted.

"But if you insist on going... I guess I can't stop you."

What?

"As much as I disagree with your methods, it's your decision to make. But I'd feel better if we had some sort of signal, so that I'll know it's you to open the door for in the evening."

I thought I was going to kick the door down I was so hungry to set my hooves upon the grass and gallop to the hunters' sides. And at that point I would have agreed to nearly anything if she would have just opened the door. So needless to say, her request was granted.

"When you return home after dark, you need to knock on the door three times and say, 'My Little Sister, let me in.' That way, I'll know it's you.

"But you're still making a huge mistake."

She walked over to the door, her expression cross and hand clenched in defeated frustration, and opened it, letting the sun pour inside the hovel and grant me freedom into the morning. The grass blades wafted in the mild zephyr that the earth respired... and in due time.

She was impertinent about the entire situation, fighting for what she thought was right for me. That's my Relena, always concerned with others before herself.

But regardless, the thrill of a hunt well played was more than I anticipated, sending adrenaline through my blood and pumping it into my legs to gallop faster amidst the withered leaves and rustic ivy that tangled about my hooves. In being pursued, I bounded through the trees and rubbed my fur against the sodden hills, leading those boorish beasts down empty slopes of green as they sifted through the disturbed earth and changing breeze to inhale a nostril full of my scent. But they were rewarded with nothing more than a mock trail.

King Heero himself and his bestial companion were the only worthy opponents that I encountered that day, with the stallion's eyes serving as a torch with lurid green flames that illumined the shade of the dense, teeming trees— A light for the hunter to ride by. The breath of his majesty's ebony steed sent shivers through my hind legs when the animal's sinew, clearly etched underneath that glossy sable pelt, carried it across the timberland with greater speed each time its hooves pummled the earth. They vaulted the horse an admirable distance, keeping him on my heels and knocking into my calves. The beast would snort and choke its resistance as Heero tugged on the reins and strangled the animal into compliance, with its mane wallowing against the lord's face when the horse reared in the evening sun— Casting them as anomalous silhouettes against the dusk that spattered streaks of light behind them. The tendrils of the king fell over his face as the wind tangled in his strands, hiding dark, sapphire eyes in a mess of brown. Cold eyes... dead pools that held nothing but intense absence. But they hinted of a need to see me dead. Only then would his mission be complete.

But I evaded his stallion and escaped the blade, meeting Relena as the moon dawned in the starless sky. When we settled in for the night, she set her head upon my back and reflexively ran her fingers through my fur, with her breath mingling with my sweat. It reminded me of the horse's heavy grunts and so also those empty Prussian eyes.

I had survived the first day.

The second wouldn't be so gracious, though. The men and hounds that hunted me lacked the monarch's zeal, not even winding me as I retreated from their howls and pursuant yells into the heart of the thicket. It was too easy. Too distinct with the excitement of the previous day. I grew restless for a formidable foe, and so I let my guard down; got haughty about my evasion tactics; and began to take unnecessary risks while in the openness of the meadows: I jumped over fences in plain sight and stood at the streams while taking long, lazy drinks. I was a perfect stationary target.

I didn't even hear him as he approached me, that russet-haired yeoman whose gaze of hollow emerald recoiled more readily than the king's blank, vacuous eyes. I could sense, though, his arrow that was aimed for my hind heel and hear the groaning of his bowstring when he stretched it taught. In that instant, I felt the vibration of the string's release as the arrow hissed through afternoon and found the tender flesh just above my hoof. I stumbled from the strike, bashing my antlers on the ground in my imbalance, but soon regained myself as I was forced to run through the pain--if I wanted to survive, that is. I didn't think about the blood that crept further down my fur, marring the auburn. I grunted against the throbbing in my head, dashing through the haze and blurry vision.

He was close behind; I heard his footsteps as they trampled the dead leaves and broken twigs. My ears itched and burned from the warning sounds and his shallow, controlled panting. If he'd been traveling by horse rather than on foot, I'd stake my life that I'd currently be a wall mount. More shafts whisked passed my rump and shoulders as I sprinted haphazardly through the foliaged protection of the thicket. They whispered of death and laughed at my former arrogance when they wizzed passed, but none met with my flesh in order to fulfill that promise, fortunate as I was.

Since I was allowed to reach the haven of our cottage, I knew something was amiss. I was an injured animal, lame and a much easier target. So why didn't he take me down right then and there at the lake? Why did he only intimidate me with his arrows instead of hit me? I didn't know— And Relena's gasp when she saw me enter the dwelling didn't leave me the opportunity to find out.

Her earlier premonition was realized as I stood before her with a partial lean on my left side and breath that left my lungs in wheezes from the exertion; my legs quivered from exhaustion and perspiration speckled my damp, matted coat. I watched her small hand, wrapped in sunbeams and reflected shadows, extend towards my heel and nearly skim the angry red, sallow wound— But then her fingers cautiously pulled back to hover at her breast.

Those cerulean eyes shimmered in the backdrop of the loft, with their sparkling, unshed tears framing her pity for me in a window of liquid crystal. Relena turned her face away and broke that glass into scintillant, fluid shards that cut her face, and walked over to the fire she had started in the center of the home. She lifted the cauldron from over the blaze, filled with scalding water that gurgled and bubbled and steamed, and dipped a tattered, white cloth into the brew. A few herbs and wilted roots were added for potency, to make an adequate paste for the poultice she concoted from the broth, and then she smeared the freshly made mustard over the dripping rag. I laid down when she left the room to stand outside, blurred by the window's filthy glass clouded with dust and grime. Her silhouette crouched in the sunlight.

I heard nothing as I waited for her to reemerge from the woods. Nothing but a soft, sad sigh that the wind carried back to me, wafting in through one of the cracks in the mud-filled wall. She was afraid, fearing loneliness. My death.

My sister reentered the cottage and wound the compress around my leg; the fibers reeked of the child's urine. Regardless of the fact that our bodies excreted the toxin, it was thought to be the most sterile ingredient for healing in our time and a very intimate gesture for her to make.

The caress of her fingertips along the cloth and her quick kiss on my back-- The touches dulled my pain, with the throbs deadening to a mere pulsation as we lay amidst the hay together. The feeble straws mated with her hair in a stubby, silken fountain that cascaded down my shoulders and gathered like liquid gold ribbons through my antlers. We were entwined, rendered inseparable in the twilight that dulled the land to a sheet of silver and blue rain, absent of any other hues in the pentangles' light. Their scorched glow singed the darkness with a twinkling rapier, with a few swings of their fiery points.

We heard the winds howling through the rickety panels, as though composing a nocturne in the offing, blanketing the summer night in an ominous frost that settled on the gale.

The children had returned.

They smelled my blood on the breeze. It made them drunk for damnation's odor as it smelled of simmering sweat and charred remains, stalking the trees for the one who was rank with the stench of injury. But they couldn't reach me here within the cottage walls; they couldn't enter without being invited. And so they circled the dwelling in a spectral ring, their lament a prayer for me to admit condemnation at their side and be lulled by their spell. To find an asylum in chaos.

But then my sister's voice rose above that somber dirge, shattering malevolence with grief as her staves and the gloom of her lyrics resounded drowsily. Her head rested on my back as she mouthed her roundelay, transforming the night's former nocturne into a requiem. A madrigal despondent and sincere.

When the moon on a cloud cast night

Hung above the tree tops height

You sang to me of some distant past

That made my heart beat strong and fast

Now I know I'm home at last

---------

One final day of the hunt remained, and I rose before the break of dawn, leaving Relena asleep beside the smoldered cinders of the fire, replacing the absence of my body's warmth with the dying embers.

The day was spent as the two before it: outrunning the stallions and their fellow curs as I jumped over ridges and picket fences to throw off their trails. But when night approached upon the wooded land, harboring a deceitful serenity in its arrival, I looked back during my trek home to find two of the huntsmen still following me, so deep into the bracken as it was. Usually after I wandered far enough into the trees, the men would get discouraged and turned back towards the kingdom and to their own families-- But these two didn't. They tracked me down but seemed uninterested in slaying me; for their horses stayed at a steady trot through the dense terrain, only heightening their pace when I quickened mine. As far as I could guess, they were pursuing me, in the truest sense of the word. Not for the outcome of casualty or retrieval, but to just observe my wandering. As if they took a particular interest in me versus all the other bucks that leapt across the green.

I led them to the house, hidden beneath the ancient, ruffled oaks that towered above. But instead of walking to the door and asking shelter of my sister, I made a detour for the rosebushes in full bloom nearby, intent on watching these two as their steeds slowed to a halt when the cottage came into sight.

I couldn't go into the dwelling. Not yet. Because doing so would risk the strangers overhearing the passphrase and gaining entrance, perhaps with the desire for a maid that they could whisk away, a virgin to molest as she hid herself from the more brutish sex. A beautiful girl who has kept her maidenhood this long-- Maybe they would be the lucky ones to possess it now.

But they wouldn't take my sister away from me. They wouldn't defile her while I lived. These men would have to hunt me down... or I would kill them first.

The muscles in the backs of my legs tensed as the men loitered in the moon's shadow, obscuring their faces from all eyes but each other's, all but dim, pretentious figures in the twilight. I perked my ears and listened to their conversation when they decided what was to be done.

And I would make neither sound nor stir until I knew their intentions— And needed to stop them.

"I don't see why we're here, Majesty." I recognized that voice, the apathy of the yeoman who followed me yesterday and almost chasing me to my death. That same emotionless tone and poise as he who struck me with his arrow-- And the king with him. "It's one deer," this green-eyed archer questioned his comrade's motives as he pulled back on the reins to steady his rearing stallion. The man's hair fell over his right eye as it was tossed in the moonlight.

"It wears a collar around its neck, Trowa, and escaped me," the monarch responded to the other as his monotone commanded silence from the bracken, the statement deafening nightfall. "I want to know where it got the garter and if that has anything to do with its ability to elude me," he explained as he dismounted his horse and set his gaze upon the cottage only a few feet away, winding Wing Zero's reins around the nearest branch.

"I understand," Trowa replied as he followed the king's example, descending from his horse and standing beside his master. "But we may be disturbing a family who knows nothing about the deer. They could have little ones," he pointed out, furrowing his brow at the nobleman. "And the last thing you need is for them to say that you tried to kidnap their children."

"Well I'm not planning on abducting anybody's children," Heero deliberately stated to his companion when he began to approach the home, the moss on the roof glistening in crumpled silver as the water retained by the thatch reflected in the pale light. "So no one should try to claim that I did."

The man with the celadon gaze kept his face stoic at the sovereign's almost sarcastic reply, watching as the king studied the door that barred his entrance, I would think to contemplate the best way to interrupt those inside without creating any unnecessary commotion.

"Knock on the door three times," the taller interjected his companion's thoughts to offer a solution, "and say, 'My Little Sister, let me in.' The door will be opened for you."

I began to approach them from behind. Cautiously—back arched with the lunar glow mirrored along my spine and my antlers lowered in a challenging stance as the two attempted to enter the house. But when I heard what the yeoman said— I froze.

"I must confess: I share your interest for that buck, and I followed him here after I wounded him the other day. He did exactly as I told you when he came here, and he was granted entrance."

Giving his attendant a cold glance, I would imagine for keeping such information about the mission from his knowledge, the blue-eyed noble reached his hand out to the door and let it wrap thrice against the wood, parting his lips slightly to mutter the phrase that would give him leave to step within: "My Little Sister, let me in."

The door creaked with a steady flood of light and swelling caress of warmth, like a fire's rain as it showered the grass and fallen leaves in the soft waving of its flames, drenching them with incinerate splashes of tawny saffron and contoured orange. And there, with sweltering tongues casting shadows across her face and shoulders and breasts as the fire swayed in a coalesced waltz with moonbeams, stood my sister. Her hands were white as they clutched the hem of her dress, startled when her eyes noticed the figures standing motionless in the doorway. Two men— And neither one her brother.

I stopped breathing, wary that I should disturb the interaction taking place with something so dumb and garbled, watching as the king and maiden's blue eyes met. Silence was their translator. Empathy their common tongue.

Heero gazed at the woman with something akin to wonder in his eyes, orbs that were usually devoid of all but emptiness now filled with the illusion of the blaze as it merged their shadows on the wall, one silhouette inseparable of the other while they kissed together by the ashen hearth. Anamorphous lips touched their faceless cheeks with an ethereal star's gleam. A union of darker selves amidst the cinders.

But her eyes, I could tell, those eyes as they glimmered with a reflection of compassion contrary to the world's ignorance, of sufferance and urgency-- They struck him listless while he watched her in the faint light. It was a shared intensity. Her expression of fear was masked by a will to survive, the need to be reprehensible even amidst oppression— Those were his eyes, his countenance that night the assailant twisted the arrow in his father's back. When blood spewed onto the his legs and the ground beneath him. When the attacker turned the knife on his flesh.

There was only Heero and Relena.

They shared the same vision... the same soul. There, in the smolder of the firelight, one spirit touched another, casting off the body and rendering the mind helpless to what a soul desires. Empathy.

It was too blatant to not see, even if I didn't want to admit it. And I didn't at the time. I tried to keep my mind blank of anything, unable to remove her from the memories of the little girl I'd known. Of the child that knew me as the only man in her life and could only see me.

But could Heero ignore her, a girl who shared his same miserable childhood... understood the torture he felt those years ago?

"She's a farmer's bitch," Trowa interrupted this intimate trance to point out such an obvious conclusion, his voice unfazed by the tension between his sovereign and the maid as the yeoman noticed the grime on her cheeks and matching grease on her gowns. "But a pretty one nonetheless." Turning away from the door, his words meant to pull Heero from his reverie and a potentially dangerous situation for the monarch's already slanderous reputation, the archer added, "She's not our concern."

But the king didn't move in the way Trowa had originally wanted, I think, for Heero broke his gaze with Relena's only to make his intentions clear to the servant as he inquired, voice low and husky, "How many of our men are hunting near here?"

"About fifteen, my Lord, but..." and then the archer understood why his superior had asked him such a question. She was alone, vulnerable, _beautiful._ The perfect prey for a few huntsmen that had too much to drink that day, looking for sport as they rode through the brush so late in the evening. As I thought _they_ had been. "I reiterate that her welfare is not our responsibility, Sire. She won't be in any danger if she stays in doors."

But Heero ignored this sage advice as he extended his hand towards my sister, limb illumined in the dying flames that licked at his fingers while he waited for her hand. "Come with us. We'll escort you to a safer place," he explained to her, voice still hoarse but with no inflection of any kind.

But Relena refused to follow, her hand loosening from around her dress to set itself in a fist at her side, stance becoming rigid and defiant even as he tried to be gentle with her.

"I asked you to come." His voice turned gruff, dangerous with her obstinacy.

She stood silently for a moment at his request, her eyes narrowing as she squelched any modicum of fear that was left in her veins. Lips pursed in contempt.

"I won't go," she whispered over the crackling of the fire, eyes once again set firm with his as she challenged him under the moon's observance. "Your offer appears kind, but it's hypocrisy. You've been anything _but_ kind to me tonight." Her fist shook. "You killed my roe, and for that I can never forgive you." Angry tears threatened her eyes. "I'd rather be raped by all your men than take one step out there with you."

"If he wears a golden collar, then he's alive," the king responded as he lowered his hand, straightening his posture as well in the dim light. If she was going to be stubborn, then he could be just as difficult. "He's hidden in the bushes, watching us."

She opened her mouth to say something in return, but gasped when she noticed me skulk up to the door like he'd said. As much as I would have liked to prove him wrong and pit my sister against him, I couldn't do it at her expense. I couldn't let her worry about me with no need to. So I showed myself, alive and well.

She looked into Heero's Prussian blue eyes, the same darkness as the midnight sky that reigned in this surreal night, only broken by the few stars that flickered against its haunting spell--the emotions that flashed across his eyes in the writhing of the flames. Her own turquoise ones searched for answers amidst those spewing craters, brimming in a past of battle's blood and subsequent pain. A sheet of mental steel that locked away those teeming hollows from her stare.

She received nothing from them.

Pulling off the silver medallion from around his neck, never breaking with Relena's eyes, the king handed the ornament to the yeoman. He turned his attention to the elder man in confidence and while fingering the glittering family crest, he instructed, "Place this around the deer's neck and stand watch outside. No one is to hunt that animal by my command."

Trowa accepted the pendant in his grip, its chain dangling over his wrist and lower arm, but moved his head slowly to the left--then to the right--and then back to the left again. He passed his judgment on the other man's course of action before he did as he was asked, disappearing outside the doorframe to keep watch over me. His eyes diligently scoured the brush for breathing, fleshy shadows that hid themselves in the foliage, just waiting for the perfect moment to fire. The kingdom's rogues.

Damn the king's concern– That medallion was heavy.

Heero brought his attention back to my sister as he rested his gaze upon her once more, her countenance still startled but now a look of confusion more finely etched, her mouth agape as a few of her tresses fell against her face–upon her mouth.

"Will you come now?"

Turning her face away, eyes seeming so interested in the silhouette of the flames as they danced in fervor across the floor and watched the few stray embers that were carried by the wind and singed the overgrown grass just outside the doorway-- Relena nodded her head. Heero held out his hand, hers coming to meet it slowly. Apparently, her doubt in his intentions lingered still, menacingly taunting her courage. Causing her body to tremble. She seemed almost ashamed of herself, that she permitted her softness to brush his skin-- That she couldn't stop herself from following him as he pulled her out of the cottage and into the full depth of the moonlight. Entranced. Hypnotized by him, I'd say.

Now _they_ were the ghostly youth that roamed across the veiled, occult midnight, their breathing a sensual nocturne as the mythril light illumined their skin and warped it with the mists of empyrean. The passionate, seductive dream of two lovers on the pastoral hillside--a numinous oracle.

****

The Shaking of an Antlered Head

I watched them as they walked over to Heero's stallion, the archer following the two close behind to make sure their touch remained neutral. His eyes were constantly on their entwined fingers, on the syncopated rise and fall of their chests-- When the raven's cry sounded overhead. Its laughter sent the forest into chaos as the alpha wolf tried to chase the shifter from its territory with remonstration to the canine's lunar mistress. But the aerial shriek only drowned the wail. Owls gargled a screech and voiced their contempt at the winged demon, for by legend, the raven's call means imminent death for the one who hears the cackle first.

The black bird made itself known as it swooped down from the branches and set its hunger on my sister's form, cutting her wrists with the beating of its wings and clawing at her moonlight eyes. Blood and scrapes ran down down her milk-white face. Yes-- The moon bled that night, mirroring Relena's injury in that crimson sheen that blotched the sky. Even the land was dismal. The bird snagged her hair in its beak, pulling at the strands and nipping at the rooted skin to tie her hair in ribbons and bands of blood– When Heero himself jumped on top of her. He shielded her from the demon and unsheathed his sword to put an end to the animal's attack.

The creature would not hurt the king, however, and as it saw the monarch holding the blond-haired maid it gave a frustrated wail to the darkness, tearing its talons from his arm. Cornflower eyes streaked with anathema flashed across the entangled two. It retreated from them as quickly as it appeared, leaving the woods once again quiet and victim of the night's silent air. My sister's wounds were the only witnesses to the bird's presence ever descending to the earth. A hellish premonition, I now realize.

He let a few moments of reticence pass before Heero lifted himself from Relena's body, pulling her into a sitting position as his eyes scoured her form for any serious wounds. Slowly. Concentrated. Relena was still dazed and just trying to catch her breath.

But if you ask me, he was gazing at her a little too intently, hands running through her hair a little too intimately as he massaged her scalp. His eyes were blank but focused-- Very focused. And I voiced my opposition to these fondles with a snort and vindictive snot, a noise that quieted the even savage, twitching Wing Zero that was anxious to embark.

"I trust you're all right, Master Heero," the green-eyed man stated to the other kneeling in the leaves, as the yeoman was already mounted and leading his horse to a stop just beside its fellow stallion. Trowa reached for the beast's reins and freed them from the branch for Heero to grab. "We have to get going if you want to take her. The court's already anticipating your return."

"Understood," the king replied as he took the reins and hoisted himself to his feet, stepping up into the saddle and looking back over to Trowa. "The roebuck can follow behind us. She'll ride with you."

"I don't think so, Majesty," the archer challenged him as he leaned back in his saddle at the command. Posture defiant. Eyebrows lifted slightly into an expression as mischievous as he could manage. "I'm against taking her at all, so if you want to bring her to her kin then she will be under your supervision. My allegiance is to you, not her."

"I'm ordering you."

"And when have you ever known me to obey absurd commands?" Trowa questioned his long-time captain and acquaintance with a sort of smugness, sitting patiently and waiting for an answer that would contradict him.

The king said nothing, although I'm sure he picked up on the hidden insult in the statement, since his eyes narrowed somewhat at his comrade. The gesture was barely evident in the darkness that surrounded Heero on his steed, especially when the man was so careful to conceal emotion of any kind. It seemed to be his hallmark, that mysteriousness of character. Obscurity his metaphysical guardian.

"You could always let her walk if you're so much against her sitting up there with you." That damnably witty yeoman-- He really wasn't helping the situation with his innuendos.

Heero sat atop his horse quietly, reflectively-- Seriously. An efficacious hardness to his expression. He looked down at Relena standing beside his stallion, watching him decide with her tired, patient eyes that just waited for his command, one way or the other– When he tugged on Wing Zero's bridle and turned the horse around. He disappeared into the thickness of the trees, with the smell of his earthen, metallic sweat lingering on the breeze--but giving no indication to his whereabouts. Trowa was still for a moment as he listened for the horse's pants and turned his head to sift through the blackness for an animate shape, trying to infer what the Perfect Soldier was up to. Attempting to read the sovereign's impulse.

But he didn't need to.

In a gaining thunder, the thrash of the stallion's gallop across the dirt yard emanated from behind Relena, in a brutal, corporeal shadow of a horseman and steed that barraged her from the nullity and advanced with the handler's arm outstretched. He reached for the woman's body in that darkness, in one, swift motion snatching her in his left arm and hoisting her into the saddle behind him. He gave a sudden kick to the stallion's side and the animal sped up in response, snorting in the moonlight while its hooves pounded faster and harder. Relena's squeal was stifled by her captor's back as she pressed her face into his cloak against the beating wind, frantically throwing her arms around his mid-section to keep herself from tumbling off the animal and chancing a broken neck. Her hair was lavished by the blustery gusts their ride spurred, a tumultuous waterfall that drenched their backs in silky, stranded breakers as the moonbeams turned gold into mythrill and dull blue against the dimness.

"We're leaving!" the king stated in a raised voice as he and my sister sped in front of us and made a sudden left when just clear of the circle of oak trees surrounding the cottage, then disappearing beyond the curtain of the shrubbery.

I immediately ran to follow them, as I wouldn't let him get too far ahead of me with my sister at his back-- But the archer simply nudged his horse into a gentle gallop, not in a hurry to catch up with his master and the woman clinging to Heero's abdomen. Apparently, he knew that Heero would eventually slow down to let Relena regain herself from the sponteneity of her arraignment, for she still clutched violently at his torso and buried her head even deeper into his shoulder blades the farther down the path they cantered.

---------

We hadn't been riding long, only about twenty minutes or so, but already our pace was set. I stayed trotting behind Heero's stallion, keeping a close eye on my sister and noticing how her hold on the man had begun to slacken the longer we rode on. It was strange-- Her eyes stared out into the dark but appeared to actually see and register nothing. They were glazed over, as though the rhythmic hoof-beats of the horse were lulling her into an empyrean of illusory peace. Lost in the hidden comfort of mental emptiness and the warmth of human flesh beneath her hands. Taken to a place where she could just forget and be a normal, bonny maid. No bewitched brother or fatal memories. Just Relena.

Heero sat erect in the saddle, in an uncomfortable rigidity that kept as much distance between her touch and his skin as possible, with his sight leveled firmly on the road-- Not even turning back to glance at the yeoman or be sure I was following. His eyes were intense but completely without visual focus. Distracted, I think. Because his mind was set on one thing.

Protecting my sister.

And Trowa– Trowa was an interesting man, to say the least. His horse sauntered lazily beside me, and the man controlling the beast appeared utterly bored with the entire situation, as if he thought the whole thing was not only foolish but a complete waste of his time. For although the archer seemed to admire Heero's skills on the battlefield and ceded him credit where credit was due, he wasn't particularly impressed with the monarch's social reactions. Which was understandable, since they were, to a certain extent, impulsive-- Yet well-thought out. Impromptu-- But always necessary. And they were never consistent. The young king acted on his emotions, a concept that, although the yeoman seemed to realize, didn't understand himself. The sovereign was more soldier than ruler, more rational than emotional-- Yet he followed whatever feelings he did have.

The Perfect Soldier Heero Yuy was, in all its definition, a paradox.

"Do you know where your nearest relatives live?" Trowa asked as he looked down to me from his stallion and then turned his head back to his master and my sister only a few feet in front of us. "I don't think Heero's about to disturb the woman for that information, and I'd like to know if we're even headed in the right direction." His tone was very factual, without the slightest hint of annoyance or any other feeling, for that matter.

I tried to explain to him that we were orphans, and that the only kin we had we ran away from for fear of death... whether it be hers or ours. But all that came out was a grunt-- A pathetic one, too. The corners of his lips quirked up in an amused smirk, as if trying not to laugh at the ridiculous sound I produced.

He had no idea what I said.

It was then I realized that Relena was the only one who could understand me, perhaps because she was there when I was transformed. Maybe she just knew me well enough to be able to read my emotions. Maybe she really couldn't and just bluffed it really well. Whatever the case, it didn't help me answer the yeoman's question.

"I didn't think you'd be able to tell me."

But then Heero proved his comrade wrong, for just as Trowa was about to take up the aforementioned issue with the king, mouth already opened to relay his concern, Heero's voice rose up against the stillness to inquire, "Where is your father's cabin?"

Relena didn't seem to hear him, though; she just continued saying nothing. She still looked entranced by the steadiness of the horse's hooves beneath her. Mesmerized by the roughness of the sovereign's skin.

"Woman," he said a little more gruffly this time, causing my sister's eyes to widen at being pulled from her musings and breath catch as she brought her gaze to rest upon the back of his neck and lower ear. "Are we going the right direction to your father's home?"

"We..." she began, but hesitated as she decided to change what she was going to say. "My father was murdered when I was only a little girl." I saw the king's shoulders stiffen at the mention of "father" and "murder" together in the same sentence. I suppose it reminded him of his own misfortune long ago. "And my mother died giving birth to me." An extended, gruesome silence. "We have nowhere to go."

"Then we'll have to bring..."

"I give you my empathy," Heero replied to my sister dispassionately, [i]forcedly[/i], cutting off the rest of the yeoman's statement. "The loss of a father can be difficult."

"Did you lose your father... your Majesty?" my sister questioned him with blue eyes that sparkled from her sadness, taking her hand from around his waist and laying it on his shoulder. Her thumb absently massaged the skin beneath his tunic, inticing a sharp intake of breath from the king.

But before he could answer one way or another, Trowa kicked his horse into a gallop until it trotted beside his master's steed, almost with a sense of urgency to interfere with the reply. He warned her: "The king's past is not your affair, and you shouldn't speak to him unless spoken to." And then grabbing her wrist so harshly, to break her contact and make her look him in his eyes, he lowered his voice and whispered, "Some things are better left untouched." He released her wrist from his grip, allowing his horse to fall back once more.

Gliding her other hand over Heero's arm and resting it on his shoulder, she nestled her head into the crook of his neck, gently squeezing his upper arms and pressing her lips softly against his back, and whispered, "I'm sorry that your father's gone." It caused Heero to turn his head a little, enough so that he could see her golden hair that rubbed against his neck and see her eyes closed for him in sympathy. Just simply watching her lips as her breathing stirred them and noticing the twitching of her lashes.

He brought Wing Zero to an abrupt halt only a few moments later, shrugging off Relena's hold on him and dismounting the animal before turning back to Trowa, saying, "It's too late for us to turn back tonight." His monotone was solid as he led his stallion to a bed of dry leaves under the shelter of a few dead pines. "We'll stop here for now." He entangled the horse's reins in one of the lower branches of a tree. "In the morning we'll return her to the grove. The hunt ends at midnight; men won't be a threat to her then."

"The court is waiting for you. They'll send a search party," the yeoman reminded him as the green-eyed man mimicked Heero's actions. "If they discover you with this woman," his eyes settled on my sister for a moment, "they'll label you a whore chaser, Sire." Heero seemed unfazed by the title and grunted carelessly, when Trowa's voice grew low, almost dangerous. "And she'll be your harlot."

Heero's eyes traveled to Relena as the archer mentioned the word "harlot" to describe her. His brow knotted at the thought, as she crossed her arms over her chest--his scrutiny much colder and more prodding than before.

She shivered. Silence reigned for a few moments.

"If I bring her to the palace with me," he began in contemplation of his options, closing his eyes as if the choice were clear, "they'll consider her my whore without question." The king held out his arms and caught my sister when she slid out of the saddle, bringing his left arm beneath the crook of her knees and carrying her over to the bed of leaves. "My father once told me that the only way to live life is to act on your emotions. If we stay this deep in the woods there's a good chance they won't find us. Her honor may be spared."

Heero then grabbed the servant's arm, bringing Trowa's face close so that only they two could hear his words, Relena watching them indignantly from her bedding. She never liked when people (namely me) kept secrets from her, especially when they directly concerned her.

But they forgot that a deer has much better hearing than any human.

"She's innocence, Trowa, and you know that. You know that I have to protect her." Heero's grip shook. "I won't make the same mistake twice." His sentence faded while he released his hold on the archer, turning away from Trowa to walk back towards Relena. But as he passed by the motionless yeoman, he stopped to add, with determination in his eyes, "I will protect her."

He stopped next to Relena, taking off his cloak and setting it on the grass to serve as a crude mattress.

"Against your better judgement," Trowa muttered to himself in finishing Heero's thought. He too pulled his cloak off his shoulders and spread it across the dirt, then untied the front of his tunic. He did it unembarrassed and right in front of my sister, who refelxively turned away blushing-- And I thought I saw Heero's eyes flicker at his attendant.

With jealousy?

"I'm sure I can find my own way back home," Relena interjected diplomatically. "Midnight's not far off, so you won't have to worry about the hunters. Besides, my roe will protect me." Heero's hand on her shoulder instantly stopped her protests, by which he gently nudged her onto the leaves and into a reclining position.

"You should sleep while you can."

Realizing he wasn't giving her room to argue, she turned on her side away from him, frustrated, I think, and closed her eyes, reaching out her hand to call me to her. I obeyed without complaint and lay down beside her, using my fur to keep her warm and licking her back to relax her straining muscles. She was disconcerted. Had lost control of the situation. And that made her nervous.

If only I'd known how disoriented she was. Then maybe I could have prevented all this.

But why question the past?

I didn't let myself close my eyes, though. Not until I saw both Heero and the yeoman lay down and their breathing become slow and even, an indication that they'd fallen asleep. Then I let sleep overtake me too, but not before giving one final glance over to the nobleman that slept so close to us. He that didn't even want to leave Relena unattended in his dreams.


	4. Damned Perversion

AN: Once again, I appreciate the feedback. I'm just so happy you all like it as much as you do.

In answer to an earlier question: Milliardo is telling the story retrospectively, so when he's telling the story, he's human. As far as the actual events of the story, in the beginning (for most of chapter one), he is human. However, also in chapter one, we learned that Une changes him into a roe because he drinks from an accursed lake. Therefore, he is a roe from that point on. I hope that clears up the confusion.

As I said, there's a lime in this chapter, so I'm warning you once again now. I think it's somewhat explicit, but I don't really read lemons, so I think I'm over-sensitive.

Thanks!

Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."

That king awoke around the very midnight hour, turning his gaze to the woman that was left asleep beside him— To find her missing. The wind played with leaves bereft in its ghoulish fingers; withered, sheaved oracles that spoke of only touch but never manifest twirling and pitching before his eyes as they were swept away into the blue. A whisper of her absence, a trail that called him forth, would lead him to her. For the leaves could not forget the beautiful child as she walked silently through the night, sepals caressing her cheek and finding refuge in her silken tendrils they once kissed when on the breeze. A lonely maiden who wandered from the recess she knew and could not love.

The sovereign followed these prophetic leaves through the shadows of the trees, staying few steps behind as they led him to a lake so sheer. A lake where amidst its waters stood a maid, naked as she bathed herself with the glass that held her body in its depths, sucking on her flesh to keep her cool. Her skin shimmered beneath the ivory moonbeams that grazed her softly; the water that rolled down her chest when she brought up her hand to wash the sweat from her shoulder glistened along the paleness--twinkling resplendence of stars dying as she turned her head, so that her shadow cast the crystal into darkness. The water fell from her fingertips and back into the lake, splashing against her thighs as the torrents met the liquid with a cry. Her hair tossed in the evening mistral and skimmed the face of the lake, reflecting stars and night's halloed gleam, causing her strands to stick to her wet skin as golden ivy of the dark.

Heero saw this beauty when he approached the lake, allowing desire to overtake him for a moment then suppressing it in a breath, turning his back to her as he remained near. His form rested against one of the surrounding trees, copulative heat from within rising as he recalled her body to his mind but denied the memory anything more than anticipatory, momentary lust. He waited for this woman, patient in the veil of twilight that concealed him, to make certain she would return to her bed unharmed. Waited to hear her footsteps upon the grass.

But she was unaware of his presence, ravishing the chill of the water as it glided down her skin, as it drank the filth from her cheeks and thighs.

But she felt a sudden tug on her hair, the salt from skin upon her mouth. Was pressed against another's body reeking of earth and beer.

A hand on her inner thigh. Fingers brushing against her nipple. A tongue on her neck and teeth that nipped at her collar and drew blood. A man's breath as it panted for gratification in her flesh, warming her cheek. Her muffled scream. His seeking lips.

She was roughly pulled beneath the water's surface, kissing her lips with liquid as she lost her breath to the night above. His hips rubbed against hers below the lake, igniting the sexual friction of a rapist for virgin's flesh. A hand pushed her up into him, feeling every disgusting inch of his need for her as he held the woman still, to impale an innocent, pristine maiden.

Then a groan choked with water. Bubbles. The sway of the current as it churned from the rash movements it withheld. An arm found its place around her body, coaxing her to the shore as she was sprawled out on the dry grass that bedded her. The face of Heero wavered above her, and their lungs desperately fed from the air around them. Gasping. Panting.

Relena opened her eyes to find his dark blue spheres staring back at her, little waterfalls from his unkempt mane dripping to her neck in a strand of fluent pearls, droplets flowing from his cheeks and then falling from his chin to moisten her bottom lip. He supported his weight with his arms, his drenched tunic brushing the slick skin of her body pinned underneath.

His eyes. They made her tremble beneath his body so horridly they glimmered in that moonlight. She could see the despair, his blame. How blue and red became one in the same in him, sapphire witness to so much blood that all he could dream of was its color. And so streaked, red mirrors his eyes became. Sullied and broken. Lost: lost hope, lost humanity... abandoned soul. It was into darkness the Prussian faded when he tried to hide himself from her gaze, robe his pain in gowns of nullity so she couldn't see. He was safe if no one knew. If it was just his he could be spared from remembering. But not even his eyes were his alone. His father was in them; the brutal face of the murderer; the killer's crazed stare as the knife cut into his lithe flesh... **her** eyes.

Reaching out her hand to his face, letting her fingertips caress his cheek through nervous breaths, shaking, she whispered, "You... I see... I see what you've seen. And I... would do anything to put an end to your misery."

She took her eyes from his and lowered her head, not wanting him to see her wretched expression as she considered his pitiful existence, what a broken soul he carried and how he wished to leave it that way. Lips quivering when she murmured, "You saved me from mine."

That was all it took.

He crushed his lips to hers with her confession, drinking from her body a hungry kiss as he sucked on her lower lip, ran his fingers along her shoulder bare to the moonlight that whispered of a promise. Gentleness and intimacy both it cried.

She retracted her hand from his face, startled by his overt lust and the sudden desire he had only moments ago refrained from consuming her by the other man, at the thirst he tempered with her flesh– Yet how haunting his touches could be as they danced on her skin, his ghostly fondles echoing of warmth but left her fevered flesh chilled with only a memory as they ravaged her entire being. It was cruel, seductive torture that he gave, drawing a whimper from her throat as he refused to stall his lips and caresses only one part of her.

So Heero, in trying to calm her trembling yet willing body as he held her close, took his hands from her arms and ran those fingers along her cheeks, brushing his thumbs against her now swollen lips as he looked into her eyes. A need for trust. Yearning to know ignorance of his sins and the lonesomeness they brought him. He let his mouth taste her once more as her eyes slid closed at his touch, so passionate as to make her run her hands through his untamed tendrils, still wet and suckling on her fingers as they became tangled within the strands.

But when Heero brought his tongue to her neck and trailed soft kisses along her collar bone, mesmeric and evanescent like fairy wings fluttering over her skin, Relena's body froze. She shut her eyes tightly against the images of that other man, his teeth ripping through flesh and licking her shoulder clean of modesty– Tears upon her lashes, hands clutching the sovereign's tresses as the back of his hand rested on her thigh. The rapist's claws had touched her there, leaving this maiden with ragged breaths. Scared of Heero's intimate embrace. She trembled.

"I'm not him," he whispered as he nibbled at her ear and smoothed a strand of wet hair from nuzzling her mouth, nestling the mark the drunken hunter had made with his teeth. Heero craved the dried blood that encircled it. "Believe in me... that I can protect you. That I can be human."

The response was her hand as it massaged his back, with nails skimming his flesh so faintly, lips meeting again in a prescient kiss that proceeded the union of their souls that night. Touches, caresses, moans, and screams that strangled the darkness as they buried their pain in each other's bodies in dual spasm. Reached bliss together with heavy-lidded eyes that spoke of love in a blurry haze they would never recall. An ecstasy only resurrected when their flesh could join again.

---------

"I haven't felt anything for a long time. Until tonight," the king murmured to the sleeping maid beside him, sheathed in his embrace as the stars showered them in mythril–-tribute to lovers' plight. "You made the pain leave. I forgot that I was a murderer and king. I was a man, and you were my lover. It was simple."

Pressing his forehead against her own, brown meeting honey-gold, Heero set his hand on her hair and let her soft, steady sighs mingle with his breath controlled and calm. And he stated so simply, as if an obvious conclusion to come to: "We share a past... we've shared our bodies... so now the only thing I can do for you is share your life.

"You will be my wife."


	5. Humor of Fate

AN: Thanks again, you guys, for all of the replies. I've posted both 5 & 6 together because chapter 6 is only a few paragraphs long. Chapter 5 is from Milliardo's POV, while 6 is from the omniscient narrator.

Thanks!

Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."

My slumber was disturbed that night by the footsteps of the king as his figure approached me, shrouded in dusk and the moon's refusal to shine upon his skin, anxious to conceal him. This silver star took pity on the wayward as she hid him from my wandering eyes, wanting to keep from me what she'd witnessed that night, in some distant hour and place. And so she obscured his body in her dreary, preternatural shadows, her face turned and eclipsing him with her darker cheek. She cast a dimness on the earth, a veil of drowsiness and solemnity and haze that clouded the mind and confused the senses, heralding his midnight venture as a dream. No more than an induced nightmare that walked by shadows' light, only to find solace as it wandered its lonely way, cloaked in mental mystery. An attempt to forget the deed that damned it to its fate.

This man walked towards our camp, the ribbons of his open tunic wafting in the wind his stealthy gait incurred, causing my ears to twitch as the leaves crunched beneath his steps and heated breathing warmed the evening. It was as if he'd left... and was now returning. But why? It didn't make sense-- But I had heard the rumors of his past, his irrational thirst for restitution. Not everything the nobleman did made sense, even when carefully calculated as his actions were. So I suppose I shouldn't have been so shocked by his wandering. But the closer he came, the more clearly I could see the shape of another human body emerge from the blur. He carried someone through that darkness.

He held my sleeping sister in his arms.

Heero had placed one hand under the crook of her knee while the other supported her back, with the maiden's head cradled gently against the figure's chest, warming it with her breath. Her silken strands draped his shoulders in tarnished gold under the moonlight. Her slumber was eerily peaceful. A sigh on her lips.

Something happened. He did something to her that night... and I didn't even want to consider the most probable scenario. No.

All I knew is that he seemed to realize someone was watching him, since his movements became deliberate, hurriedly laying Relena upon her former bed of leaves yet still careful not to stir her, then jogging over to his cloak where he stayed for the rest of the night. Not reaching for her, not even facing her. Just getting what little sleep he could before daybreak.

Yes. Something happened. Something had definitely happened. Behaviors were modified. Little discrepancies began to show themselves in the all-telling, omniscient light of dawn, and Trowa seemed to notice them too. He looked over at me while he watched the two ready themselves to leave, his stale eyes commanding me to observe them and their habit. To confirm his suspicions.

Interesting

Relena no longer sat behind the king on his stallion, not having to reach her arms around his waist for support. He placed her in front of him this time, his arms wrapped around _her_, almost protectively, as he pulled the maiden to his breast. Hold desperate.

Possession

My sister's hand found its warmth with his, her fingers absently stroking that callused skin as a plea to entwine touches, to sate longing. His grip loosened from the reins, distracted by the heat of her hand. His fingers unfolded to clasp hers, although the gesture seemed reflexive.

Tenderness

Heero rubbed her body against his as he shifted his arms, subtly writhing his flesh to graze hers. Skin caressing skin. Her soft moan and subsequent, sharp intake of breath were muffled by his tunic.

Desire

Oh God, they...

****

Shutting of eyes...

... a swallow...

We weren't going back to the cottage anymore... we were riding for the castle. A change of plans proposed by the bastard himself.

And I couldn't stop him.

Trowa couldn't stop him. The yeoman even grabbed his sovereign's wrist, calmly, quietly gave him every reason why the king couldn't do this– But it was all in vain.

I was no match for Heero's strength the way I was, and the archer had no desire to break his allegiance with his master. Trowa was a man of truths, of unwavering pledges and reflective alignment. His word was his bond– He couldn't betray his own king. He wouldn't conspire against the man who commanded him all those years in war and massacre, entered sin and shame with him. He'd been drenched in Heero's blood-- Camaraderie that could never be retracted, no matter how much the yeoman may have wished it now.

And so the king brought Relena to his palace and married her that same night.

And married her.

Heero was resolute, sincere as he held her hand before the crucifix-- It was the only way he could keep her and reign over his people as his father would have wanted: through matrimony. He made a vow before God and man that she was his and that he loved her, in the only dimension he could love: physically, in the corporeal tradition. Only then would humanity let him be, let him drown his sorrow in her body... in her love. Then he could rest his guilt at her breast; her being fulfilled him. It was what she deserved from him.

That's the only explanation I could find.

And his haste wasn't surprising to me, either. He harbored a lot of guilt, a lot of pain; and one night wasn't going to satiate his thirst for redemption from the nightmares, from his memories... from the past. He would have to do it over and over again, filling her with himself so that he could be rid of the shame and deposit it in her, for her warm womb to abdicate and scald into menstrual ashes. An obsession... addiction for her flesh, the soul within that constantly called for his, without mitigation. The essence he touched when they made love. Drowning the blackness in a mask of holy light--hollow and spurious. It was cruel abuse to use each other... but it was the only way he could escape, and the only way she could help him.

They were so ignorant of love that they believed sex embodied it. So innocent that they thought copulation and climax were the only ways to show their love for each other.

Even now I pity them.

She was no longer a part of me-- She was a part of him. A tool for release, glossed in a soldier's love as perverted as it was, renewed by her body's warmth and yearn for touch and heat from him. They fell to the basic temptation and expression of humanness: it's craving and inclination for lust. Something we all desire, repress, gratify and fantasize about. And yet it was a need he, seemingly, had never known, although condemned by his own humanity to need that sexual opium to make him forget and feel.

And... and I couldn't do anything about it.

So I gave her up, gave in to what she wanted-- To what [i]he[/i] wanted. What he had stolen from me. Raping her love.

What choice did I have? I couldn't leave her with him, but I couldn't stand to see them together, either. It made me sick each time, to witness such love and abuse made one in their eyes. My throat would close off... and I always wished for death or to wake up and find Relena and myself back in our cottage, together and happy like we were. To be embraced in the sunlight and my sister surrounded by laughter and innocence as she twirled in the falling, copper leaves. To see her eyes sparkle like the morning dew and sprint back from the meadows in a dress stained with dirt and grass.

But that never happened.

Reality would grip its hands around my neck sadistically, making panicked welts on my imagination, and then let go before I collapsed into my delusions. Teasing me. Whoever said that death was the ultimate fairness and held no bias hadn't lived my life everyday for the next two years after their marriage. He would have modified his understanding, rephrasing it to say something more like: "Death only comes to those that don't want it and takes away the most dear from our lives." Yeah. That's about right.

But I had promised to protect her, and so I stayed.

I lived in the stables that were tucked away in the far corner of the courtyard, the furthest I could get from the castle without being too far for Relena to come visit me. She came as dusk settled upon the earth each night, to sing to me as storms raged overheard, as Mother had done. Or sometimes she simply spoke with me as we used to those day now passed, those times that I vividly remember. I pretended like nothing had changed.

My love for her was the same. That was a fact. No matter what she does to hurt herself or me, my love for her can never diminish. I can't let her suffer like that– I'm obligated not to. I'm her brother.

Two years from their wedding day my nephew was born, whether he was the spawn of a night of gentle love making or fervent lust I was never certain. But he remains the one beautiful thing that Heero ever gave her.

On that day, Heero, Trowa, and I were out surveying the kingdom a day's ride from the palace, despite Heero's reluctance to leave my sister's side as her time drew near-- And he wasn't alone in that concern, but I was worried for other reasons than his. I was apprehensive for her survival and the child's health, since most mothers in that year were striken with the Fever after giving birth, leading to their deaths and malnourished children. He, on the other hand, said that he felt he should share in this miracle and her pain as they shared the common grievance of molestation. For once he would be her implement, made an object for her passion to empty its sweat and screams--of agony instead of desire. Curses rather than moans. Let him drown in her pain and allow her to profanate his warmth. But it was his duty as monarch to pay heed to his people. And Heero was an obligatory man: duty came before desire, mission before intuition. So he left her.

It was a boy, the sentinel bearing the news told us, a healthy child with his mother's azure eyes and the dark strands of his father. The queen had lost a fair amount of blood, he said, but nothing that her handmaids were too concerned with. But we didn't trust their judgment. Neither Heero nor I would leave Relena in the protection of others for very long. She was Heero's corrupted salvation and my life; we couldn't survive without her love... at least not unscathed.

So we made haste to return to her side before the day was out, the new father riding ahead with the herald as Trowa finished our business in the country so that I, too, may return. But not even Heero, with avidity on his heels, could reach the castle before morning.

As it has been recounted to me by Relena and her trusted nursemaid Lucretzia– A very respectable woman that I have come to know and grown quite fond of over the months. She visited me in the stables every afternoon, attending to my meals and freshening my blankets by warming them over the coals and beating the dust from the worn wool. Her eyes constantly watched me. A soft smile weathered her face as she swept out the loft. She usually sat down on a stool beside me during the day, when the king and queen were off on their own. She'd scratch behind my ears or stroke my stomach in the sensitive spot. And I would just regard her silently. A mutual respect between us.

Her voice is engraved on my memory, the stories that she told me about her childhood with Heero. He broke her heart each time he left for war, not even saying good-bye but promising a bloodied return and more coldness. Her devotion to my care was a show of affection that I hadn't received from another woman besides my sister. My mother as well, I suppose, but this just felt... different. It was... interesting... intimidating... yet so welcomed, all at the same time. And she even had her own name for me, the same name Heero's father answered to: Zechs. The reason: she claimed I looked regal, almost kingly with my antlers.

From what I understand, Lucretzia was the daughter of Heero's father's younger brother, and thus Heero's last remaining kin: his own cousin. But because Heero's father was the eldest brother, his son became heir to the throne rather than her, even though she was older. And the fact that she was female didn't help to substantiate any claim to a crown traditionally passed down through sons. But she didn't seem envious of Heero's privilege. She appeared more relieved that she escaped such an obligation than anything else. And I don't particularly blame her.

Who would want the responsibility of governing a country? Not I.

And considering the fact that they were relatives, much of their conduct towards each other was strictly business related. Respect was there but not enough warmth to call it love– At least not on his part. They seemed so distant, so disparate that one wouldn't believe they'd grown up in the same palace together. She was resilient like him, but much more personable and open with her emotions. She seemed to understand the importance of love and family at a level foreign to him. Kinship just wasn't the sovereign's most competent connection with others. But Relena took to the woman immediately, and I think that helped Heero cede his cousin a little more attention than before. More confidence.

But now I've skewed drastically from my original thought.

As I found out from Relena and Lucretzia, Stepmother apparently had a daughter, whether our father sired the evil spawn we were never sure, and her beauty faded into deformity and perverted ugliness when the moon appeared in the heavens, hiding her former prettiness in the halo's dark crater. She was left ghastly when drenched in such shadows, with tethered skin that covered her right eye completely, and her once snow-blonde strands hung limply on her shoulders in garlands of white. She was the cursed child of a crone. Just as callous.

Supposedly the witch was bitter from rejection, because Sister ensnared the king with her sincere empathy and commiseration; her Dorothy was never even given the chance to woo him. As if the hag and her offspring were denied something that was promised to be theirs.

"Why else would I have married your poor and plain father," Une revealed to my sister on that ghastly night, her true intentions made clear. "I needed to eliminate the competition; and it's always best to work from the inside." But her ploy went awry that day I interrupted her from overturning the cradle and attempt at strangulation in the woods. She could have never guessed that Fate Herself would seek retribution on Relena's behalf, for if She could not bring the maiden to the king, then She would bring him to that lonely maid-- And so She did.

Stemming from this jealously, Stepmother plotted vengeance against my sister. She and her daughter used their arts to disguise themselves as transient handmaids to Relena and arrived at the castle near the time Sister found out she was with child. Their "references" were impressive, and they seemed genuinely interested in the queen and the welfare of her baby. Knowing now what I wish had been apparent to me then, they were a little too enthusiastic for the prince's birth...anticipating something more.

As a matter of fact, they told me it was Dorothy who took on the raven's feathers that night in the bracken so long ago, attempting to mar Relena's face so severely that the king wouldn't be able to look upon her without revulsion. But once again Fate had intervened as She saw fit, placing her blessing on the golden-haired child and scorning the one who donned sepulcher's down.

As Relena soon told me, Une and her daughter actually assisted her in the birth of her son.

"This child must die," the witch declared with such malevolence as she stole the babe from my sister's breast, letting the newborn's head dangle over her arm as she spoke. The child's deafening screams reverberated from against the castle stone as his breath staggered.

"No. My. Baby." Relena gasped in weakness from the blood loss of the delivery, weariness luring her eyes to fold shut and muscles surrender to oblivion. Sleep. A place to forget and be deaf to the wails of her baby, to his pain-- It was so tempting. But she wouldn't succumb, tried to lift herself from the sheets to retrieve her child from their clutches, with linens sticking to her flesh from the blood and sweat that glistened upon her skin. Her body convulsed and twitched from spasm, ejecting more warm crimson between her thighs.

But Dorothy held her to the bed, a wicked smile pulling at her lips as she watched Relena's eyes well with tears, heard her groan and squeal in an untamed, maternal sorrow as she thrashed against Dorothy's weight. The witch-spawn easily thwarted my sister's struggling, but Relena refused to let them kill her baby without a fight. She wouldn't be my Relena if she didn't.

Turning back to my sister, whose brittle limbs settled onto the sheets as unconsciousness threatened her, the shrew scraped her nail against the child's forehead, evoking a moan from his already hoarse cries, and seethed: "You took away my dream, that my daughter would marry a king and be known far and wide for her fortune. You robbed me of my greatest dream for my daughter, and so I rob you of your most precious hope for your son: life."

A lone tear falling down her face, the moon kissing the trail as it scintillated against the maid's corpse white skin, Relena raised a weary hand to her baby and pleaded, "No... I stole your dream. Take. My life instead. You can't blame. Him. For what I've done."

"He must be sacrificed for the broken promise, and so he shall be. We'll see if your little angel can use his wings to keep from hurling to his death from a fall from the North Tower."

His blood spattering the cobblestone below to leave the tiny bones cracked, sticking out as jagged spears from his skin with depraved, crimson ribbons--just as the knife did out of our father's flesh. Cold... gruesome– These were the images that plagued my sister's mind, she said, as the witch uttered such a fate for her son; images that relieved her of her consciousness to find refuge from death, away from pain... away from Stepmother and the horrid girl.

Une carried the little prince to the stairs of the turret, the baby's howls resonating shrilly in the corridors and causing the stained glass of the windows to sing. Threaded cracks formed between the crystal pieces, letting in fragile strands of starlight. But before she could begin to ascend the steps, Lucretzia saw her taking the baby and stopped the woman in her tracks. The handmaid had no reason to bring the boy to the tower.

"Where are you going with the prince?" the nursemaid asked the elder woman quite blatantly, noting how the "maid" allowed the infant's head to hang over her arm, mercilessly depriving the child of his breath. Malicious. Negligent.

"I was merely taking the baby from the room. The queen is not well from the birth, and I didn't want his wailing to disturb her." Une narrowed her eyes, in turn lowering her voice dangerously at the adversary. She would not let this rejected heir interfere with her revenge.

Stepping closer to the witch, her mind set only on gaining possession of the prince, Lucretzia remarked in an almost casual tone that mocked this shrew's cunning, "That's rather odd. I can't imagine Relena being indifferent towards the suffering of her own child. Why don't you give him to me, and I'll be sure to tend to him for you."

"I have him just fine," the brown-haired woman answered her with contempt, stepping aside of the nursemaid to resume her trek up the stairwell. She would have none of this.

"Well then, perhaps I should just enter the queen's chamber and ask her opinion about it myself..."

"You can't enter that room," Une challenged her, almost startled as she turned from her mission at the turret to catch the younger girl's attention. Allowing the nursemaid to enter the room meant discovery, and with the king due to arrive in but a few hours time, the hag couldn't afford such a complication to her plan. She was now faced with a choice, neither option befitting.

"And why not?"

The crone didn't answer her; she had to consider her options carefully. So she responded to the query with silence, her grip on the baby becoming so fierce as to force a yowl from his tiny mouth.

"Either hand me the baby," Lucretzia threatened viciously as she let the infant's suffering impact her demand, "or I'll take this up with the queen. It's your choice."

What choice had she? Either forfeit all chance of revenge in being discovered or fulfill only part of her oath for vengeance. Neither scenario appealed, but at least if she surrendered the child she could massacre the mother. That would have to satisfy her.

She thrust the babe into the waiting woman's arms, with such fierceness in the resignation that the black-haired maid could barely keep her grip on the child as he was shoved against her breast, which left the elder free to enter Relena's chamber with an even more malicious perversion in her veins. Breath heated by anger. Eyes aflame with hatred.

My sister would pay for her servant's insurrection, this witch was sure, for as far as Une was concerned, the youthful queen would never bask in the light of day again or her lover's intercourse. She would be damned to a mortal hell. And Une saw to it.


	6. Hidden

Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."

Upon her reentrance, the heathen dame grabbed her daughter by the arm and pulled the gruesome wretch away from the bed and sleeping Lady. The fatal hand of the mother strangled the younger's wrist as she whispered low to what death the queen should succumb. The repulsive child listened to her matron's cunning with an almost sexual satisfaction, for the young one's lips curled in such a wicked quirk at the vehemence the witch had spoken--a nod as her approval of the venture.

They lifted the weary maid from the linens, now soiled in dried blood and damp from earlier sweat, and dragged the body to the dungeons below the castle grounds. Deep into the bowels of that dank crypt where skeletons rotted, meat still decaying on their ribs despite the brittle dust of the skin that covered them. A place where the glow of the sun and sibling moon never touched the frosted stone, light never cast.

They pulled her body through the corpses' ash, curses shrieking from the carcasses' souls now long forgotten as her figure, limp and beyond its will, disturbed their profane relics. These two abandoned her in a cell even devoid of the dead men's company, only darkness her cellmate when they shackled her to the stone. Between the limestone's cracks the rodents dwelled, fed on the muscle they tore from the limbs of their fellow, human inmates in adjacent cells to this one, whether alive or dead. It made no difference to them.

The witch and spawn left her there to die alone, unknowing of her family's fate, for no one would ever find her in that labyrinth that was the palace dungeons.


	7. Illusory

AN: This one leads up to the end, which is... weird, to say the least.  I also wanted to say that there is an epilogue after chapter 8, so we're still not quite finished. 

I feel sorry for Milliardo in this chapter... and Heero, of course.  I hope you enjoy this one as much as the previous.

Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."

As was later told to me, Heero returned that following morning to find who he believed was his wife lying in their bed. He looked at me stoically when he later recalled her expression, with her soft pink lips slightly parted from the teasing of warm breath and the rise and fall of her breasts that lured him to her side.  She was unintentionally seductive in the fragile light of daybreak, with her absent, sensuous moans.  With the unconscious rubbing of her toes against her shin.

**_Shudder_**

Her sighs whispered of an erotic heat as they scalded his flesh, he claimed unabashed, while her groans caressed those lips he meant to devour—the breath he carnally hungered for, to consume in a kiss. Her arm rested just above her head, bedded in her hair as those golden tresses fondled her shoulder, the breeze from the window stroking them and running its transient fingers at her neck. Brushed her body faintly, tickling her skin. She lay in ignorant, licentious slumber, with their infant prince just as restless. Yet on the child's face were the chapped remnants of earlier irritability, scarring his cheek with chaffing tears.

This king took quiet steps toward my sister, not wanting to disturb her or his newborn son with his presence-- For he was always a more sensual, affectionate man when thought to be alone.  Or so Relena has told me on occasion--something I didn't necessarily need to know.  He knelt before her sleeping figure, his face hovering just above her own and strands making mock love with hers, and he brought his hand up near her face to merely skim her forehead with a finger's graze.

"Relena..." he whispered nearly breathless as he beheld her troubled countenance, licking his lips as he murmured her name, to alleviate the crispness in his voice.

Even today I can still see that confusion in his eyes as he looks at his son; it still mystifies him that Relena willingly offered him her innocence, virginity, and sexual surrender when all he could offer her were bloodied memories and monotone. Restrain her in unbridled intercourse that released his seed of vengeful souls and unshed tears. A spasm in doubt. Yet she bore him a child, loved him so unreservedly that she let him empty his remorse into her body each night their flesh in sweat and promise became one.

****

**_Haggard Sigh_**

He vouchsafed guilt for her soul to bear on his behalf. There was just too much for one spirit to survive alone. And so together— Through touch and caress, groans and sexual grinding in the junction of their muscles, two souls that became inseparable as love was made beyond their miserable pasts… they had created a legitimate miracle: a tiny, baby boy.

It's sickening to have to believe that.

Heero leaned in his face to brush her lips with his own, his tongue running along the edges of her mouth to grant him entrance in their oral mating duel— When the shadow of the witch, disguised as Relena's faithful handmaid, cast him in its breadth. An ominous judgment.

Her voice clashed against his ragged breathing as she seethed: "You mustn't disturb your wife, my Lord, for she is tired from the birth and needs her rest."

"Leave us," he commanded of her gruffly and in lewd tension as he turned his gaze from Relena to the servant; his muscles seized warningly when the shrew made no attempt to vacate the room.  She merely stood obstinately as though he had said nothing, eyes narrowing at his defiance.

Taking a step back from the bed, Une grasped the calico of her dress between her fingers as she returned his cold demand with smugness, a sinister confidence in her stance. "She has lost too much blood to be certain of her survival, and your being here only jeopardizes her condition. I would hate to think that you wish to add the blood of your wife to that of the many others that smear your reputation."

His reply was silence, the dreary eyes of an aroused lover that spoke of nothing but desire. His was a suspicious need that betrayed nothing. Only the lifting of his knees from the floor indicated his submission.

If he were pressed, he would leave. It was something he seemed resolved about all along.  For he had a greater sense of obligation than to let his family perish in his indulgence, especially a gratification as morbid as sex. He'd rather surrender his wife and child to distance than to their deaths. He would never risk them— Not for himself.

But as he reached the edge of the room, he halted in the doorway, his shoulders rigid and poise deliberate in divulging his battle against the anger that tried to surface, that rage aimed at himself.  He could only blame her remark on his own choices and despicable history; he was the one who committed the murders. Who earned the derision for that carnage. No one else. The accountability was on his head, and so he would endure the consequences it wrought.

Yet he allowed a glare against her earlier words—bitterly conceding her the fight... for now.  But not without a vow of mutual challenge to follow, it seemed.

Still more convincing than that, it was what happened over the next week that caused both Heero and myself to doubt this queen that the handmaid protected so thoroughly. The girl who slept soundly in the bed that morning, appearing nonchalant about Heero at all as the days slipped by.

For when dusk neared the following day, Heero begrudgingly rose from his stack of decrees, proposals, and pending edicts to take Relena's hand for bed, as was the usual custom.  But as he twined his fingers within her own, leading her to their chambers, since they never slept apart-- She pulled hers free from his ritualistic entrapment to rest upon her thigh, nearly sneering at his touch.  Her body trembled as darkness dawned, as the moon emerged from the gleam of the fading sun and immersed the castle in its feeble, supplementary light.  She looked at him, her eyes threatened with an urgency to escape from Heero and his penetrating stare, to leave her alone for fear of... something. Desperate for seclusion as she seemed. 

And so without a word she turned away from him to follow the corridor to their bedroom, hands coming up to her face in a tentative shield as her steps changed from a hurried walk into reckless haste the further down the hall she ran.  She was revealed in the moonlight that flooded through the windows in torrential, omniscient waves, washing away her asylum. Groans wailed from her lips as she slunk through the door, grasping the right side of her face in agony as her nails scraped along the flesh at her own disgust. Nearly wretched, searing her skin with angry red welts.  Leaving Heero to wonder.

Her visits to my stable bed ceased after that day, along with any acknowledgment of my presence whatsoever. I approached the castle to question her about her absences the next morning, but when I called up to her from beneath her window's ledge, she only stared at me. Raised her eyebrows at my garbled grunts, as if she couldn't understand what I was trying to tell her– Before shutting the window to put an end to my interrogation.

She always had time to listen to me. She was always able to decipher my broken tongue. But that morning she couldn't, and later refused to try.

She didn't even seem to know who I was.

But the final piece of the puzzle disturbed us most, because when the prince cried out for milk from his mother's breast, she ignored his sniffles and squeals entirely and pulled the blankets over his head to muffle his annoying wails.  She would leave him alone in the room to cry himself to sleep on an empty belly, with hunger pains stirring the child from his rest.  Deprived sniffles drifted from the chamber as he was forced to nurse on his own flesh.

"Relena," Heero asked of her that evening, clutching her wrist in his hand and forcing their eyes to meet.  His baby was dying, and nature had damned him to helplessness in this practice.  Against his responsibility to protect this child, _she _had to produce the milk _their_ infant needed to survive, for it was a craving only the mother could abate. Father sedate in only watching and waiting.

Curse his sex.

"He needs your milk if you want him to live. Nurse him."

But when she held the baby to her breast and let him wrap his lips around her nipple to suckle, his stomach received nothing but more emptiness, testified by the little boy's moans and his mouth that sucked the air even when she pulled away. The feeling of her nipple was still reminiscent in his mouth, his starving body not willing to accept that she had left him with nothing.  So he was forced to pacify his thirst for milk with the salty, undernourished water form a tear.

Her breasts were dry of any milk for him.

The father's expectant gaze was at her back as the prince's cries begged her for something to ease his stomach's churning, and the young mother therefore knew she had to do something before her husband reprimanded her again and the child's screaming deafened her from sanity– So she shoved the boy into Heero's arms, marched out of the room as she warned him bluntly, never turning to look her husband in the face.  "You can't expect me to feed the thing if it won't stop screaming. From the way it carries on, it doesn't want to have anything to do with me or my milk. So now it gets nothing."

It was a strange reply.  Relena didn't run away from her mistakes or defeats of any kind; I couldn't think of a single instance in which she had, not even when one of Stepmother's penalties loomed. Instead my sister embraced them as weaknesses that, once conquered, could pave the way for an opposing strength.  According to her, from fear can be born courage, for in being afraid we learn to risk ourselves for the very desire to be fearless.  From sorrow love can thrive in its place, for in misery our hearts open to the finest company. Faults are not attributes to be feared, but to be molded into perfections. The girl before us certainly didn't exemplify that same outlook.

This wasn't my little sister... but her looks said otherwise.

Then the problem worsened.

As Lucretzia soon revealed to us, her eyes aggrieved and voice halting with what she was to tell, refusing to even step all the way into the room where we stood listening: the third night after the prince's birth, she was sitting near his crib—as was her normal routine since he was born—and watched him in his restless sleep, beset with hunger and abandon.  The starlight nestled his gaunt face, only casting deeper shadows where his cheeks were sunken and rubbery bones protruded from his flesh.  He looked old and worn, like a skeleton, coughing and sneezing because of the dust in the nursery--from his parched throat. 

She was so desperate, she said, she felt so sorry for the baby that she even unlaced her gown and held him to her own breast to feed. That by some miracle she may save his life. But she was no mother of any kind, whether new or of many children past, and could therefore give him nothing. She prayed for milk, and she was granted a child's tears.

"It... was a cruel tease to him," she whispered with her shoulders quivering, "to have my nipple between his lips and get nothing from it. I only made him even more upset."

She then replaced him in his cradle and began to tie her frock once more– When she saw a figure move against the darkness. An apparition of the queen that so frailly, forlornly staggered towards the crib, her flaxen tresses frayed and dull as they strangled her wrists to pale, bloodied beauty.  Her hair rubbed raw against the sensitive skin, carving it with spattering crimson blotches and bracelets that dangled down her arms.  Her tendrils were tangled around her waist so taut that her chest refused to rise when her lips parted for a breath.  Even in a soul's wandering her delicate body still remembered life, the delicious function of respiration.  Her gowns were tattered, drenched in blood that dripped along the folds, torn to reveal small teeth marks on her calves.  Vermin punctures that spit blood on the floor, in salivary streams of infected, vile, corporeal fluid.  Her eyes were downcast and flesh white as the moonbeams that shimmered through her essence.  Nothing but glassy evanescence.

The specter kneeled over the malnourished body of her son, but no shadow formed over his face as she hovered above, only a mythril glow that entered through her back and cut through her translucent sinew to land upon his hands and feet, surrounding the innocent babe in light.  Relena shed one tear as she beheld him, his gaze weary and body fragile against the solid wood of the cradle. And with those lucid hands she brought the child to her breast so that he could suckle, ran her finger down his cheek and kissed his little head with her lips soaked in sweat.  It stilled his form to passive sleep, once again in his mother's embrace, and after laying him back against the pillow when he'd had his fill, her phantom found its way to the stables.

Of these happenings I remember nothing, but Luctretzia said that Relena lowered herself to the hay beside me and stroked my fur a moment as I slept.  She whispered of sorrow and of pain, of her despotic punishment she had and would endure for her lover betraying Fate.

But that was only for a short time, for she soon rose to her feet again and carried her languid ghost to her bedchamber... to the place where Heero slept in an empty bed without her. To the place where promises were sealed and another begotten.

Sadly she entered the room, bringing her hand to her breast in wonder at the sight as she watched, nearly mesmerized, the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest while in repose.  She listened for the patter of his heartbeat and anticipated his exhalation, waiting for the next throb before she observed him instinctively inhale.  Standing vigilant to his every breath, her lips shaking at the reflex-- It was such a sacred cadence since she had none.  She took a few lonely steps forward to close the space between their skin, lowering her mouth to his lips to claim them in a brittle kiss.  Relena drew breath from his mouth, spit from his tongue as her form grew more tangible with every second more they kissed.  The moonlight reflected from her flesh, no longer through it, brandishing her pasty and sepulchral.  He was breathing for her... warming her body with his heat.

He was giving her life.

But then she pulled away. Stopped the gentle sucking of his lower lip and stepped aside... reduced to the shallow essence of before.  Her body degraded to a prism.

Lucretzia just observed her, followed the ghostly maid from nursery, to stable, to bed.  She was unable to speak as the girl turned to her, gaze so mournful as she requested, voice echoing against the stone:

_"How is my child?_

_Is Heero well?_

_How is my roe?_

_I can only come twice, _

_But then no more."___

This apparition appeared again the following night: nursing the child, stroking my fur, and kissing the king.  It was all the same, identical to the previous evening.  But Relena's face was more despondent this time, telling of even greater pain as she wandered through the corridors.  As she haunted the stable with her sighs.  Tasted mortality with her lover when her spell she cast.

And once more the specter turned to Lucretzia and cried:

_"How is my child?_

_Is Heero well? _

_How is my roe? _

_I can only come once, _

_But then no more."_

It was then that Lucretzia came to Heero and myself with these appearances, body shaking slightly beneath her robes, lips shuddering from enigma. 

"You have to see her for yourself, and she says she won't come after tonight. This may be your only chance.

"She comes to see _you_," the woman told us as her voice broke in desperation, letting her hand clench into a fist by her side. "She doesn't even notice me except to tell me how many more times she'll come.  But she may listen to you.

"I just can't..."

And so as the moon flooded the land with a ghoulish river of white and the stars illuminated the nursery in their light, the king and I sat together beside his sleeping son, waiting for this spirit to come.  His arms were crossed over his chest, eyes hidden by his unruly bangs to keep his expression secretive. Heero was always more comfortable when his emotions were elusive; then he was only vulnerable to himself.  He was in total control.  But I knew he was anxious-- He had to be.

He was about to lose everything. If what she said was true-- He may be a widower before the hour.  Heero opened himself to Relena, shared his past and his destructive soul.  His broken body.  He gave himself a second chance at humanity. 

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... _shame on me._

This king had to be anxious, even if he didn't show it.  This could be the last string of emotions he ever had for his beloved queen... for my sister.  Relena.

For _anything_.

She returned.  True to her word the apparition arrived as midnight struck, taking her child from the cradle and feeding him for the final time.  But she seemed unaware of our presence--or perhaps deliberately ignorant--with all of her being completely focused on her infant son.  She just stroked his face and kissed his chubby fingers and stubby toes.  She let her lashes flutter against his cheek, causing a few drops of milk to spill from the side of his mouth as he giggled at the ticklish sensation.

She smiled.  Nostalgically.

But before she stirred again from her seat beside the crib, wearily facing in the direction of the stables, Heero stopped her in her tracks.  She stilled, unwilling to pass through him and with her eyes cast downward, waiting for him to move aside or speak, it seemed.  Whichever came first. 

She was disturbingly stoic.  Decayed and striking.

Narrowing his eyes and forcing her own to meet his, he acutely demanded, "Who are you?"

One tear glided down her cheek at his question, and in response she raised her hand to his face, only to leave the residue of decadence and hollowness where her finger grazed, and whispered:

_"How is my child? _

_Is Heero well?_

_How is my roe? _

_I'm here now, _

_But I won't be anymore._

"I am Relena... but after tonight..."

"No," the king grated as he locked his fingers around the phantom's wrist and pulled her into him, feeling nothing but chill as he held onto her illusion... not the substance of her flesh and blood. "What's wrong?"  His eyes were impassive-- But intense. "Relena?"

"Heero..."  Her words caught in her throat.  Her voice was hoarse.  Shuddered.  "I don't have anything to say.  What do you want me to tell you?"

"Why?"  She sobbed.

"Heero..."

"Why didn't you come to me before now?"  Her wracking body startled him, with a glint passing across his feral eyes.

"I did come to you, Heero," Relena murmured as she touched her fingers to her lips and then pressed the pads against the lining of his mouth. "I've been with you these past few nights, watching you sleep."

His eyes widened a fraction at her confession, or at least I believe they did, as his lips began to tingle from her illusory kisses of before, at the breathless sensation that returned to his throat as he ensnared it from a recollection of those two dreams.  She being there, sucking on his mouth and their tongues touching in the sedated darkness– They were his fantasies... now verified as memories.

He suddenly pulled her into his arms and, without a word, leaned down to give her his lips that had once, on those former nights, sustained her— But she turned her face away and rejected him, her eyes vacant, staring at the ground.  Heart-broken. 

Her form passed through his fingertips and into the darkness of the corridors beyond the chamber.  Into that faithful darkness that always welcomed her return.  Lonely and hopeless.  Realized the devastation and morbidity of physical dependence--the danger of loving by sex and knowing nothing more profound.

"I'll give you my breath..." he said to her back as she walked the passage, his voice gruff and raspy from the desperation that choked him.  The need to feel her beneath him. "...I want to protect you."

But she continued to stumble through the darkness, as though deaf to his pleading.  She chose to ignore him, her back slumped over and intent on her destination, hobbling through the halls with nothing more than painful grunts.  "Because I must protect you..."  Her whisper silenced the evening air; her light vanished in the blackness.

But Heero would keep her safe as he had promised, as would I– I could never revoke my vow to her.  I'm her brother.  And so we followed her spirit close behind.

We chased her dejected soul down into the castle dungeons, finding our way through the maze of debris and filth by the vanquishing light her specter cast.  She acted as a subliminal torch through that rank, mortal tomb, her beauty surrounded by grotesque cages of metal and crumbling limestone. But we were soon halted as we saw the apparition approach a woman's battered form, its wrists dangling from chains welded in the wall.  She was dead within the musty, guttural ruins and dilapidated shadows, which provided a sanctuary for the rats that nibbled on her dress's hem.

It was foul.  Disgusting.  To see my sister's rotting corpse.

The soul descended into the cadaver's flesh, marred by dust and splatters of blood along her face and arms and thighs.  It dissipated entirely beneath the sinew and returned a dulled flush to the woman's cheeks, her breasts moving just slightly with her breath.

Weak.  Still alive.

But then a voice rang out through the stagnancy, broken only by the screech of the rats' claws that scratched against the stone. A voice that caused my fur to stand on end as my mind placed a name to its so familiar, putrid tone.  "I don't remember giving you permission to come down here... and disobedience is not a crime I take lightly. But I'm inclined to grant you amnesty for the sake of my daughter, so forget what you've seen and leave."

"Une," I grunted as I arched my back and scraped my hooves against the ground for speed, fluid dripping from my nose as I snorted in the heat of rage that drowned me in its retaliatory seduction. I lowered my set of antlers in range of her stomach, charging the witch out of revenge for what she'd done. She'd murdered my Relena. She tried to kill my nephew.  She was going to rob me of my family again. 

_No.  Not again._

I would have my vengeance.... I waited so long, and it was finally mine.  I almost wanted to laugh in the satisfaction I felt, drunk on my own retribution.

But no.

All that vigor fled from my limbs when the shrew's eyes began to glow like fired copper on my fur.  Her out-stretched hand forced me to the ground as she lowered her arm to the floor, in mimicking my body's struggle against her sorcery.  My legs fell from under me.  My head felt impossibly heavy.  She drained me of my strength.  Of my last hope for vindication.  All taken away by those eyes I so gravely feared as a child.

Her subtle cackles that held within their depths the lament of Relena's condemned soul were the last sounds that surrounded me that night before I succumbed to her spell.  They tossed me into darkness, into a void where my sister's cries resounded over and over again, becoming louder with each reverberation.  I saw her face, watched the tears slip down her cheeks and felt her body convulse in her despair.  She reached out her hand to me.  I couldn't grab it-- I was too far away.  My one, last memory.

Relena was dead... I couldn't save her.  I couldn't even avenge her death.


	8. Replaced Resurrection

AN: Well... the final chapter. It's been a wild ride, I think, and I also hope that you find this chapter... surprising and fulfilling. This chapter was designed the way it is because almost everything said in it is both literal and symbolic. So be on your toes. :wink:

Remember: there's still an epilogue that will tie up the loose ends more clearly. Rethinking the whole series now, I've changed my mind-- The epilogue is my favorite chapter.

At the end of this chapter, I've also written out an explanation to the symbolism as well as cleared up something I thought readers needed to be made aware of--maybe to confirm some suspicions.

Enjoy, and thanks!

Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."

The man. He who knew her intimate, coital caress; the echo of her heartbeat that thumped wildly in her breast; the feeling of his skin pressed against her heated flesh that made them one— Stood before his lover's body, the empty shell of a woman who owned him once in sex and soul. And so with a hardened glare he reached for those metal bracelets that held her bound.

Wouldn't be intimidated by the adversary who burned his back with her occult, malicious eyes.

The witch's hand extended toward the king and mate beneath him, nothing but the wail of the sorcery emanating from her hand and its sinister, black remnants disturbing the deviate silence as Heero pitched his body in front of his wife's and suffered the pain on her behalf. It thieved the breath from his throat and twisted his bones, contorting his body in evasion--sharp cracks reaching his ears as he was pushed into the wall. He involuntarily threw his head back when his spine arched in trying to elude the raw energy that seared it-- Leaving him rigid, almost impossible for him to turn and face his enemy. Heero clutched the jagged stone to keep from falling on Relena, his form shuddering as breath returned to him and strength gave way.

"I'll kill you," he vowed dangerously to the shrew at his back, grunting as he forced his knees to raise him. Groaned as he tried to turn himself to glare at her.

Another strike between his shoulder blades was her reply, his tousled strands brushing his wife's lips as his head fell to her breast in weariness, cheek cradled within the softness of her collarbone that reeked of death. His lips were dripping with blood... her own kissed in sweat. So close but never touching.

He lifted his soiled fingers to her jaw, tracing the bone that was so apparent in her depraved, gaunt death. And setting those bloodied lips against her ear, satin to cold skin, he grappled with a song. With lyrics that left his tongue before he even knew them. Of a beauty he wouldn't dare touch but continued to speak against the pain.

****

You offered me an eagle's wing

That to the sun I might soar and sing

Abandoned but for the three mortals entombed in that condemned brig, all breathing and utterance but theirs mute-- The voice of a woman distilled the stagnant evening. Her song was quiet as it approached the reticence, then echoing through the guttural, limestone hovel; slowly, languorously the knell joined with his in the second rime, converged with the rhythm of his heartbeat. A cadence of his reviled spirit. Of epiphany.

A voice that hoved over the darkness with a whisper--of a tragic mother who sought her children and the life she sacrificed for the birth of one baby. Her daughter's life that nearly ended before it had begun. Its resonance cried of a mother who betrayed death and smote heaven to give her daughter the only gift she could render, wrapped in the distance of fatality-- Of one final song. This requiem was the sad memory of the one who bore the king's lover and perished as she gave the child life those many years ago. Unconditional love sputtered from his lips in a hypnotic rune, welling from a buried, demented hollow.

****

And If I heard the owl's cry

The mother's soul sang through the body of the witch as the verse went on. The fair tresses of the long-departed maid shimmered against the nocturnal, dirty strands of her successor, as the wench's moans faded into the ghost's pitch. The timbre slowed and haunting, **retaliatory**, cinched the evil one's tongue around her throat, forcing her to gargle on her own flesh. Slender, pale arms of the mother coalesced with those of the other as the righteous lifted her arms to heaven, her notes higher and higher as she sang. Shattering the night into starlit shards, luminary mirrors that reflected the night Heero first took Relena as his lover. Crystal once filmed with lascivious panting; smudged with morbid, carnal sweat; and smeared with the residue of corporeal sex was wiped clean. Clear and scintillant. A beautiful, timeless love gleaned from perverted lust. Evil made virtuous. Wishing into trustful hope.

The shrew fell down on her knees as she was possessed by this once gentle spirit, her sorrel eyes shrouded in a blue as deftly surreal... as they became the sight of the apparition-- Embodiment of something greater. Of something distinctly male and female.

****

Into the forest I would fly

The baritone of the king, he that served the vigilant mother as her vessel between the supernatural realm and she that fed from his eternal precedent, blended then with her coloratura. The resplendence of her spirit and staves leashed the witch in its dreadful citadel, as the phantom matron embarked for the heights from whence she came-- With her brilliant light arraigning the essence of the crone, slave to follow as the song drew on over the earth. As amidst the reverberant song Heero set his head against the dilapidated, cold wall and used his knuckles to caress Relena's cheek. His hand lightly shook from the physical strain... but his eyes were peculiarly soft, with a sad calmness chipping away at his stoic face. A rare, new expression. He finally realized, but too late in her death. Too late.

"I love you, Relena."

Relena's love had been enough, had purged him enough, received all of his past guilt and pain. Fate made it so, fashioned that love and tragedy into a child. One that would live forever in their hearts, as long as they continued to beat. A gentle, innocent symbol that cooed and cried and depended soley on them for his survival.

As their metaphysical love depended on them.

Them.

Not Heero. Not Relena.

Them.

But too late.

As Fate had intended them to learn. As Une attempted to keep them ignorant. And Fate is a just punisher.

It left Une nowhere to flee but the arms of the spectral maid and her holy glow, surrendering to a ghostly hymn and further lifted to the light by a lover's harmony. Their voices faded into the darkness... into silence.

****

And in its darkness find you by

But Heero's voice continued to brokenly sing amidst the stillness that settled upon the crypt, his mouth near the lips of his lifeless maid as he broke the reticence. The notes were skewed and monotonous... but his own. No ghoulish mother to make his pitches smooth and steady, no one working through him. The apparition was gone, waning like a dissipating, resonant memory.

But she wasn't needed anymore. Her love had been replaced with the call of restored souls. Much more haunting. Much more unitive.

He no longer sang, but spoke earnestly, intensely. Yet still somehow musical amidst dry timbre.

****

So our love's not a simple thing

Nor our truths unwavering

The moonlight grazed her white skin beneath him, glistening upon her cheek as warmth returned to illumine her flesh. Her breath clouded in the chill of the night, rising up to his face like gentle fingers. And amidst the glow of the moon these rasps touched his lips and traced his jaw.

A sigh that whispered of resurrection.

****

Like the moon's pull on the tide

Our fingers touch our hearts collide

I'll be a moon's breath from your side

Relena's descant, hoarse from death and weakened by the curse– It bespoke his prosaic melody as she brushed her fingertips over his mouth in a silent promise of her life renewed. She shared with him the final line of her mother's lament... the wretched lullaby a woman sang for her those years long ago.

****

I'll be a moon's breath from your side

Now usurped by the edict of destined romance.

AN: Why, you ask? Why did Relena and Milliardo's mother's spirit return? What was the purpose? Why the singing? In case you're confused (as you very well might be... it's difficult for me to see how plain the symbolism is, since I'm the one who wrote it), I'll use this little space here to offer an explanation.

The mother represented the unconditional love between a parent and a child. Remember, Relena's mother died after she gave birth to her... an ultimate sacrifice. In other words, the mother's ghost symbolized kinship, the bond and love of family. Therefore, in one sense, it embodies Milliardo's love for Relena--his unconditional love and the only real love she's known up until the final chapter.

However, Heero finally, FINALLY is able to differentiate between love and lust, love and abuse, etc. (hence him finally telling Relena's corpse that he loved her--he'd never said that before). Earlier, especially from chapters 4 and 5, we got a sense that Heero needed Relena as an opium, so to speak. He used her and felt the only way her could molest her "honorably" was through marriage. More simply, he thought he wouldn't be sinning/guilty if he was using her as a sexual tool in marriage, rather than out of wedlock. He didn't abuse her consciously, mind you, but he used her, nonetheless. I said that they were soulmates and that Relena loved him... but I never said that Heero loved her in return. Subtleties, you know. He was connected to her intimately and spiritually, but he didn't acknowledge it on the same level as Relena... until this chapter. He started to recognize it in chapter seven (thus his: "I'll give you my breath"), but he didn't have his full epiphany until this final one. Until he thought it was gone. Until he realized what his actions had indirectly resulted in: her death.

I made him protective of her, like in the series, because I wanted that to be the foundation of his love--the one, ignorant, subconscious way that he could show her. He originally said he wanted to protect her because she embodied innocence, like the family that he slaughtered. But once she could empathize with him and show compassion, you could tell that his motivation quickly changed... whether or not he verbally acknowledged it, his actions did. Why would he have slept with her if he was trying to preserve her innocence, as he originally claimed to Trowa? Contradictory. Thus, we knew his feelings and thoughts had somehow changed.

Heero became that innocent little boy again (like before his father was killed), free of the guilt. Relena freed him. That's why the baby being a boy is so important, because the son is the symbol of Heero's newfound innocence and redemption, proof that he can love.

Why was Heero the matron ghost's vessel? Now that I've explained the perverted nature of Heero's love evolution, you can probably guess that him being her avatar and, later, singing/speaking on his own, represented the fact that he finally discovered love. Now, unlike Milliardo, his love would be dominant in her life. As the text says: the spirit's love was "replaced." It's not implying that Milliardo's love is no longer important, but rather that Heero could now love her properly--be her new lover.

Another thing: have you noticed some of the vibes given off by Milliardo in each chapter as he describes his sister? Perhaps that the descriptions are a little more... romantic than they should be for a brother speaking about a sister? If you picked up on those vibes... good for you. :wink: I suppose you could substantiate a claim for Milliardo having incestuous feelings for Relena, if you would--I wrote him that way. Am I saying he and Relena has an incestuous relationship? No. I'm leaving it up to the reader to decide. Before you say that's out of character, stop. In the GW series, Milliardo and Relena's conduct towards each other was remote and respectful (business-like). However, they'd been apart for most of their lives... yet he still hugged her and wanted to protect her (implying that he still feels some sort of kindred bond for her, even when separated for so long by time). This makes me believe that his love for Relena is extremely, extremely strong... just awkward. In this tale, though, he and Relena went through hell together. He had no choice but to dominate and protect her. The witch was their parent for most of their lives... I'm sure she hadn't taught them any great values (luckily Milliardo remembered his father and could, thus, teach Relena a sense of morality). Therefore: perverted upbringing, bad home-life, and a desperate, over-bearing love of a brother. It kind of reminds me of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." Her father was domineering, and she had an incestuous relationship with him. I got my inspiration for the quirk from that story, actually.

Finally, why the singing? As you've noticed, song has been an important element throughout this story. In my opinion, when one sings, the words seem to more clearly come from the heart. That's why they had to sing in this final chapter--Heero, in finding love, was finally using his heart.


	9. Epilogue

AN: I just want to thank all of you for your comments, attention, and support. I appreciate all of the feedback. Thank you. I hope you've enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

This ends the series more fully, on a much more light-hearted note... I suppose. When this scene played itself out in my mind, I had to laugh. I just felt like this really captured the essence of the series itself. I also think this chapter is the most true to the actual GW characters. That's why this is my favorite part, because of the closure it brings. I tried desperately to keep them in character, but the situation in this story vs. the original anime is so disparate-- I tried my best, and I hope I didn't mutilate their personalities too severely.

Thanks again, and enjoy this brief, final installment.

Disclaimer: I don't own GW or "Brother and Sister."

Epilogue

I awoke to find myself asleep in my sister's bed-- Fingers curled over the hem of the sheets. Fingers. Hands. Hands that I held up to the sunlight to bask in its warmth, its beams reflecting from my fingertips as the glow washed my skin in gold, my platinum hair illumined.

Heero stood silently at the window with his back turned to me, looking out at my sister as she rode her pale-colored mare around the corral, mother trying to evoke an amused smile from the child. Lucretzia waited beside the horse with the prince in her arms, all three laughing as the animal's face brushed against the baby's toes. But he soon took his gaze from her and his son to rest on me.

"Milliardo."

"Heero."

We both said nothing for the moment, just staring at each other. We had been sharing this girl for over two years, but because of the curse, the amount of verbal contact that we ever had was limited to grunts and groans. And so there existed a sense of awkwardness in the room as we both realized that we would now be living under the same roof, competing for Relena's attention.

"Relena?"

"She's safe."

"How?" He didn't answer me at first, simply turned his eyes back to my sister as her laughter whistled on the morning's breeze. No longer seductive to him, it seemed. Just... the laughter of his wife.

"A desire to love... and to be loved." He placed his hand upon the window ledge, the sun's light blinding me to the expression in his eyes... if there was any. "A promise from a while ago fulfilled."

I understood. He didn't want to give me details surrounding the confrontation that he'd had with Lady Une. He didn't need to. I didn't help defeat her, and so it wasn't my place to ask for answers.

And yet could I forgive him for what he'd done to her all those nights? For taking my revenge from me, what I so rightfully deserved after what I suffered with Relena all those years before? Brooding in silence as I was witness to their former molestation?

No.

But I had to be grateful for his sacrifice. I had to allow him that.

"And the girl that appeared to be Relena?"

"There was a daughter involved, and she and the witch used their sorcery to make her look like Relena. One of the daughter's eyes disappeared at night, and their magic wasn't strong enough to replace it. That's why she wouldn't lie with me. She didn't want me to notice and become suspicious."

"Which is why she couldn't nurse my nephew." Heero nodded. "Where is she now?"

"Taken care of," the brown-haired man responded curtly, warning me not to press him for an explanation. Again, it wasn't my place to know.

Bastard.

The room was dampened in silence for a few moments following his answer, leaving us there to reflect on the past... to think towards the days to come. It was a compromise that seemed to form between ourselves, sympathy for the hardships endured by each other that made us more willing to share her love than I think was originally prone to our characters.

She loved him. He made her happy. As a beast I could understand why she turned to him for companionship, since I couldn't give her the same love we had when I was human. She needed someone who could hold her and touch her. Something I as a roe couldn't give. But now that I could resume that former love, I wasn't so willing to let him hold her... to let him touch her... let him kiss her. I did that for her, eighteen years before he even knew Relena walked the earth. It was my privilege— And she gave it away... to another man.

But it was her gift to give, and if she chose to grant it to him, then I would have to learn to accept it. I would come to accept it.

I extended my right palm out for him to take, lifting myself from the pillow as I said the words my heart denied but made me utter regardless. "We are brothers now."

He grasped my hand, glancing one last time out the window at my sister before he gave his approval to our kinship. He understood. "Yeah. For Relena's sake."

"Yes... only for Relena."


End file.
